Tucson Region

Bead artistry, begun at age 6, lured him back to Red Road

He was born in the Bronx, fair of skin, blue of eyes. "My mother was an American of German heritage. But my dad was a full-blooded Lakota," says Charles Smith, 71. The Sioux obviously won out on Smith, who wears long white hair, a feathered necklace and a vest he himself beaded. The vest, along with dozens of beaded designs also crafted by Smith, comes from the skills he literally learned at the knee of his Lakota grandmother, Stone Wolf's Woman. "When I was 6 years old, she made me a little loom out of two combs," says Smith, who as a young child visited the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota every summer. "I beaded my first diamond." Today, his works sell for hundreds of dollars - intricate designs involving hundreds of hours and thousands of beads. Consider "Vision Quest," which took 295,000 beads and a year to make. Framed on a loom and backed by rabbit skin, the work portrays hawks, falcons, mountain lions and an Indian on horseback. Yet Smith has also beaded a table runner for a woman in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles based on her china pattern. "She called and asked if I could do a rose petal," says Smith, who stuck rosebuds along its border. Clearly, here is a man comfortable in both worlds. Yet it wasn't always so for Smith, who was taunted as a boy by those on both sides. "On the reservation, the boys called me 'White Eyes Boy.' But my great-uncle's friend, Holy Eagle, told me: 'It doesn't matter if your blood is not pure. It only matters that your heart is pure.' " His father had joined the Army during the Depression, a way to get off the reservation and make some money, says Smith, who moved to Tucson three years ago. "When my father left, so as not to insult the family, he changed his name to Warren Smith." Stationed in New York City, Warren Smith - whose given name was also Stone Wolf - met and married Gertrude Treasnure in 1932. "They married at city hall," says their only child. "My mother's mother kicked her out of the house." At age 5, young Charles started visiting his father's people on the reservation. "My father and uncle, Bad Wolf, taught me the ways of the Red Road, the culture. My grandmother taught me how to bead on a loom." Smith's father, an accountant, would escort him to the reservation by train as far as Rapid City, S.D., and then by wagon to the reservation. "He would go back to work after a week," says Smith, who stayed with his grandmother in her tiny house. No water, no electricity. "Poverty was my first impression," says Smith. "It still is." But when he was 12, his parents divorced, and he was no longer allowed to visit. At 17, he joined the Navy, where he continued to bead. After his hitch was up, he went to work for an airline company, married three times and raised a family. "I was living as a full-blooded white man," says Smith. But always there was the beading, which he sold at various powwows. Some 20 years ago, he returned to Pine Ridge for the Black Hat Pow Wow. "It was wonderful," says Smith. "I did an honor dance for my grandmother and put flowers on her grave. "I call my grandmother the Indian within my soul. She seems to always be with me." And now he, too, is passing down the ways of the Red Road. Concerned that the type of picture beading he does is becoming a lost art, Smith has taught it to all 13 of his grandchildren. Smith's work can be seen at Old Pueblo Frameworks and Gallery, 1825 E. River Road.