I’ve been talking to friends and reporters about Harry’s work, where it is, and what will become of it. It is a project of some proportion, given a lifetime of creative output. I worry that not enough people will notice his gift, that the ignorance that plagues Native art scholarship will skew the beauty and lightness of his canvas. I worry that his struggle and the struggle for many more to simply achieve a level of humanity in the reception of their work will not come about soon enough. There was no place for Harry in mainstream fine arts and that is a crime. It is a crime largely born of covert racism and fear and I am angry that this intolerance continues. But I don’t think Harry was angry. Harry was savvy enough to just get on with it and continually add his grace wherever he saw fit. There was not a sense of a loss of self-worth, but a dignity, the kind of dignity born of a generation that really did not have many resources to draw upon but that learned somehow to walk tall. I like to think of Harry like that.
Squeaky Shoes

Los Angeles, 2001. Harry and I had been invited to give a talk and afterwards decided to spend a day at the Getty Museum. He was so entranced by the textures of the paintings that he would come right up to the canvas, within fractions of an inch, drooping his glasses from his mouth, unconsciously chewing on the ends of the frame with his eyes furrowed in concentration. More than once a guard had to ask him to please move back from the artwork, but it seemed to have little effect. To make matters worse, Harry had on new shoes that squeaked loudly on the pristine marble floors. The shoes were like little loudspeakers announcing his arrival in each room. I could find Harry anywhere in the galleries that day, but so could the guards. Flying back we changed planes in Phoenix, drank a few beers and laughed until we both cried by playing naughty with a massage chair perched at the entry of one of those high tech stores in the terminal. I seem to remember that we drew a crowd.

Returning to Santa Fe was depressing, after all. We stopped for food in Bernalillo and as I drove us steadily north up I-25 he told me stories from California, of aunties, cousins and history. As he spoke, he carefully held my food up for me, feeding me with the care reserved for a child. It was his way of being completely present, totally absorbed in the moment. I wanted to be sad but his tenderness would not let me.

It is easy to say things about Harry that confirmed his place in our lives. I received an email recently from our Italian colleague Mario in which he called him “the great Harry.” What will be hard is being a bit like Harry, for he walked so tall. It is not our sadness that really matters but remembering in every small way what it was like to be Harry in a world that often does not care to see us tall. He was the best of us, so now we must be that as well.