by Brian Faircloth
first published in NCSSM Magazine, Summer 2004, Volume 5
[NCSSM Magazine, Summer 2004; Other Campus & Student Publications; NCSSM Digital Collection]
Here's what most people know about Joe Liles: He's an artist. He's been at Science and Math forever. He has a pony tail that is longer than a young child's arm. He has an interest in Native American culture.
Here's what many people may suspect about Joe Liles: he's a hippy, he grew up in a commune with weird parents, and his interest in Native American culture is some deliberate manifestation of his hippy ways. Clearly, he's not Native American, so all this Native American business must be invented.
This is what you may suspect about Joe, and if you do, this is where you're about as wrong as Joe is genuine.
211 Woodside Drive
211 Woodside Drive, right in the middle of Wadesboro, North Carolina, was where Joe was raised, in what now seems to Joe as "one of the first brick ranches ever built." His father was a World War II Navy veteran and downtown businessman. Joe's mother worked as a medical technician—the only medical technician, actually—at the local family practitioner's office on Thursdays. The other six days she was busy raising Joe and his three siblings.
Pine-studded and All-American, Woodside Drive flowed down an incredibly steep hill to a dead-end. It was every child's winter dream and every licensed adult's worst automotive nightmare. "There was a device at the bottom of the street in the dead-end that we called a breakneck," Joe recalls, the slight hint of a smile creeping into the corners of his mouth as if remembering a number of hair-raising adventures. "It's sort of like a concrete cliff. We called it a "breakneck" because, if you went off the road for whatever reason and continued into the dead-end, you would certainly break your neck."
It sounds idyllic, and it was in many ways - the small town setting, the neighborhood kids riding bikes up and down the streets on humid summer evenings, the mother and father who were known and respected by everyone in town. Joe's childhood was good and pleasant in a postcard sort of way; but, there was more to that happiness than the steep street with all the pine trees. In fact, the other half of the picture may be one that Joe holds even dearer to his heart:
Cows. 150 of them.
There were also two mules, endless fence posts, and miles of barbed wire. On top of that, the farm had watering holes for the cattle that doubled as fish ponds, and a railroad track on a raised bed of gravel and timbers that carried the weight of Atlantic Coast Line boxcars. These things were as much a part of Joe's life as was the life in town. In addition to running the family business, his father also carried the responsibility of keeping up the family farm that Joe's great-grandfather built on the outskirts of town.
"I had the best of both worlds growing up," Joe remembers. "I had the comfortable home in town and all my friends nearby and everything we needed, but I also had this huge family farm of 500 acres that I spent a lot of time on as well."
On the farm was where Joe felt most comfortable, digging fence posts and stringing barbed wire and fishing for bream and bass and catfish. With Bermuda grass under his feet and the sky overheard, Joe felt at peace.
Taos, New Mexico. 1967.
In Taos, on a hot summer afternoon, 17 year-old Joe Liles' life took a significant turn.
A Boy Scout since he was a small kid, Joe had landed a summer job as a handicraft instructor at the Philmont Scout Ranch in nearby Cimarron. Seeking a change of pace and scenery, Joe often went into Taos on his time off.
One afternoon while walking through town, he heard the steady beat of a drum and the rise and fall of voices deeply involved in an intricate song coming from behind a motel. Intrigued by what he heard, he followed the disembodied sounds until he came upon a group of tourists gathered in a half circle. Joe made his way to the front of the group.
Before him were two Native American men, beating out a rhythm on a tight-skinned drum. Around them several dancers kept time with the music. In that moment, Joe's life changed forever.
"I wasn't so interested in the dancers, [but] I was drawn to the music that those two guys were singing," Joe says. "I just stood there for the longest time, listening, trying to figure out how they could possibly be singing this totally complex music."
In time the songs ended, the dancers ended their dance, and the tourists melted away.
All except for Joe. He was transfixed.
For three more summers Joe returned to New Mexico, where he absorbed as much as possible about Native American music. Eventually, he too began to sing.
Under his wing.
"Here's one of the things about Joe Liles," Linwood Watson says. "He can flat-out sing those songs."
The man I'm talking with is a member of NCSSM's Class of 1993. He is a Haliwa-Saponi Indian, a physician practicing family medicine in Pembroke, NC, and a close friend of Joe. They've been friends since Linwood was a student at NCSSM, where Joe took him and other Native American students under his wing and helped them through their time at the school.
"I'm not artistic," Linwood says. "Let me just say that. So I never aid get around to taking an art class. But I heard that Joe was into Indian culture and so that's how I became aware of him." Joe, Linwood, and other Native American students at NCSSM formed an Indian culture group at Science and Math called Akwe:kon, a Mohawk word that means "All of us together." Through the group they hosted NCSSM's first powwow to promote the school to Native American communities throughout North Carolina. The NCSSM Powwow has become one of the largest in the state. For many people, it has also become Joe's signature achievement, the thing most readily associated with him outside of his artwork.
Today, Linwood, Joe, and nearly 25 others, including additional NCSSM alumni as well as Native Americans unaffiliated with the school from tribes all over the state, participate in a singing group called Southern Sun. The group keeps a busy schedule, often traveling out of state to perform traditional songs.
"We go to these different events sometimes to sing and we'll all gather around and I'll see these other Indians that don't know us sort of looking at Joe like 'What's he doing here?' And I tell 'em, 'Look, he can probably sing these songs better than you.'"
At a naming ceremony for a newborn child in a small rural Indian community just outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Joe met a medicine person named Eddie Benton. Joe was now in graduate school in Ann Arbor, traveling "all over the place" every chance he got with friends from U of M, visiting with Native Americans in rural communities throughout the Great Lakes region.
There was an instant connection between Joe and Eddie. Eddie offered him a job teaching art at a school, called The Red School House, that he was starting through the American Indian Movement in St. Paul, Minnesota. Like the experience in Taos, New Mexico, this was a defining moment for Joe. He accepted Eddie's offer and went straight into the job after his graduation from the University of Michigan. Joe stayed for three years. "This was the first time I was full-time in a Native American Community so, you know, there was no longer any of this outsider/insider business. I was a part of that Indian community."
Though he didn't know it at the time, this progression of events—Taos to Ann Arbor to The Red School House—was part of something larger. It would lead Joe to discover something about his family from generations before that would, in this emerging order of events, make perfect sense to him.
At a spiritual ceremony in Manitoba that Joe's group was attending, another medicine person approached Joe. "I learned something about you in that ceremony," he said.
Joe asked, "What was that?" The medicine man replied, "There was something that happened in your family involving Native Americans that was tragic. Some type of accident, but I could find nothing more than that." Joe had no idea what he was talking about.
Funny you should mention that
Nearly 300 years ago, Ephraim Liles, an ancestor of Joe's, shot what he thought was a deer while hunting in a stand of trees along the border between North Carolina and Virginia.
But Ephraim had not seen a deer moving through the woods. Ephraim had seen a Native American man camouflaged by the hide and head of a deer draped across his body. The man Ephraim shot was hunting too, stalking other deer in an effort to feed his family just like Ephraim.
Ephraim gathered him up into his arms and carried him as quickly as he could to the nearest Native American village some distance away. The man soon died. As best he could, Ephraim explained what had happened and owned up to the terrible mistake he had made.
He left as quickly as he could, realizing that he had done more harm than any good he would be able to do. To stay in the village any longer than absolutely necessary would be to invite possible revenge upon him for the hunter's death.
As soon as he arrived home, he explained the situation to his family. Fearing retribution, Ephraim gathered up his family and left, heading south for miles until they crossed the Pee Dee River near the South Carolina border. On what is now the Anson County side of the river, the county Joe was born and raised in hundreds of years later, they unloaded their belongings and began to build a new home for the Liles family.
Joe's father told him all of this as Joe was home visiting family.
"I told my father about what this medicine man had said to me," Joe says, and my father said, 'It's funny that you should say that because he had recently found an old letter written by one of our ancestors that told the story of Ephraim Liles."
"Now, as soon as I heard all this, the first thing that came to my mind was that maybe my involvement with Indian people was somehow setting things right in the spirit world," was Joe's response.
God, the Creator and two cedar trees
Most Sunday mornings growing up, Joe was with his family in the pews of the First Baptist Church in Wadesboro, singing from the Baptist hymnals, listening to sermons built around passages from the Holy Bible, celebrating traditional Christian holidays. He drew a measure of strength from the church and its message.
Like devout Christians, traditional Native American people are a deeply spiritual people,. Their daily lives are governed by their connection to the Creator, and to the connection between every living person and every object in nature. "Many non-Indian people," Joe says, "have always thought that Indians pray to rocks, you know. And some people might think that Indians pray to the drum. And none of that is true. What is true is that Indian people believe that everything is alive, that the rocks are alive, that the drum is alive, and that all of these natural living things are conduits to the Creator. So, you're not praying to rocks, and you're not praying to the drum, you're praying to God just like people in churches and temples and mosques and synagogues everywhere do."
The more involved with Native American culture Joe became, the more concerned he became with the potential conflict between his Christian upbringing and his exploration of Native American spirituality. "I remember being concerned with the essence of that contradiction," Joe recalls. It was during this time, when he was "in the midst" of attending a number of spiritual ceremonies throughout Michigan, Wisconsin and Ontario while in graduate school, that his grandmother in North Carolina passed away.
For quite some time Joe had "had this prayer in mind, asking about this contradiction. Was it there? Did it matter? And I was asking, you know, for a sign to tell me what the answer was."
He got his answer, on the steps of his home church, as he emerged from his grandmother's funeral services.
"Right across from the church were these two cedar trees, and as I came out of the church those two cedar trees just started moving," Joe says, "almost like the wind was blowing them. But there wasn't any wind. I realized right then that that was the sign I was looking for. The Creator, through these trees, was telling me that there was no contradiction at all...that all religion was about understanding your relationship with the Creator, and there was no contradiction with the Christian way of going about that and the Indian way of going about that."
It's a philosophy he's been adhering to ever since.
An ongoing spirit
The 2004-2005 school year marks the beginning of Joe's 25th year at Science and Math. An incredible number of students have come through his class. He has seen students, both Native American and non-Native American, discover talents and passions they didn't know existed. For people like Linwood Watson, Joe's curiosity, acceptance, and easy manner served as an inspiration and safety net.
'I like to say Science and Math is Short term pain for long term gain," Linwood says, recalling his experience at the school. "Science and Math lets you practice for the real world when the mistakes you might otherwise make in the real world don't count. And Mr. Liles lessened that pain. Through his art, as a teacher, through the Native American group, Joe made it more bearable."
Not only has Joe continued his work with the Native American community since coming to Durham, he has expanded the depth and range of his exploration of the culture. In addition to the Powwow and the drum group, Joe has also been heavily involved in a program called Dreammakers, designed to bring more Native American students to the School. He, along with a number of his students, has done extensive research on Fish Dam Road, an old Native American trail running through the Triangle region. He has contributed numerous drawings to a multitude of Native American groups all over the country to help promote the programs they run. He's currently in the process of writing "A Drumstick's Story", a fictionalized account of a drumstick that, through its circuitous route through the country as part of various ceremonies and Powwows, illustrates the unique stories of America's Native people.
Most recently, Joe has discovered what could be "a lifetime of work" among the tribes in California.
Perhaps most indicative of Joe's commitment to Native Americans is something that occurred not long ago. A fellow singer in Southern Sun told Joe of a dream he had recently had, a dream in which a man was singing a song he had never heard before, a song as beautiful and true as any he had ever heard. And as he came closer to the man singing the song, he saw that it was not another Indian. It was Joe.
As he told Joe about the dream, the singer began to beat his drum as the first notes of this song he had heard in the dream, which he now dedicated to Joe and called Legends Never Die, flowed up and out and away as it joined on this day a history rich in tradition and spirit.
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