Billy “War Soldier” Soza, The Wind Only I Am Afraid Of

0:00:05.2 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re in Art Bridges’ storage, looking at a work by an artist who has two names: Bill Soza, also known as Billy “War Soldier”. He was an extremely accomplished artist, but he was also a political activist. His friends referred to him as a modern day warrior, taking on the art establishment, but the political establishment as well.

0:00:29.4 Dr.Ashley Holland: Bill Soza was a part of the American Indian Movement, and that’s where he acquired this name, Billy “War Soldier.” This is not a name that is given to somebody who is meek. Soza was born in Southern California in 1949, and he is part of this generation of Indigenous artists that attended IAIA, which is the Institute of American Indian Arts, and are thinking about this new Native art form. What does it mean to be an Indigenous artist in the late ’60s, in the early ’70s?

0:01:04.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: This is a time of women’s liberation, of Black activism, and of Native American activism, when the Red Power Movement is becoming national and gaining white America’s attention.

0:01:16.0 Dr. Ashley Holland: These artists are existing in a world that is essentially saying that Indigenous people are no longer around. The government policies are incredibly detrimental to Native communities. And so artists like Bill Soza are responding to that.

0:01:32.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: The painting is titled: The Wind Only I Am Afraid Of, which is a really evocative phrase that speaks of the artist’s bravery.

0:01:41.0 Dr. Ashley Holland: We don’t know where that title came from. And I haven’t been able to find the source for it. This is something I’ve had to become really comfortable with the work of Soza is that I don’t know the answers to everything that’s going on. But there are things that I start to pick up on as I’m going through it, of this heart line that’s coming out of the buffalo and then emerging into this deep blue sky with red and white stars. Obviously, this is somehow referencing the United States government, and these kiva steps in a very almost Pueblo scene. And then it just continues with the green scene of is it a rainstorm or is it a field with flowers and this repeating motif of circles and then the pink at the bottom. There’s so much that’s happening and you want to decipher it, but I think in the same way that the title doesn’t have a clear answer, the painting, to me, does not have a clear answer. And that’s okay.

0:02:40.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: The painting, for me, is also really complicated because it sits between figuration, a representation of the landscape, and also pure abstraction. It’s jarring in the way that it flips me back and forth. And so you have this incredible tension between two dimensionality and three dimensionality.

0:02:57.1 Dr. Ashley Holland: These are not perfect stars. The words are not squared up.

0:03:01.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: You’ve got this kind of rich ultramarine blue, and then you have the stark black and white, but then you have very sophisticated colors below that, this deep, rich green, that beautiful ochre, and then a dusty rose, but it’s deep and beautiful.

0:03:16.9 Dr. Ashley Holland: He has scraped away part of the paint and we assume that it’s intentional, but we don’t know why.

0:03:23.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: It does feel like the entire painting is playing with a kind of private iconography, that the artist is creating his own visual language and he’s not necessarily willing to communicate it to us.

0:03:35.6 Dr. Ashley Holland: And that’s okay. And we may not know what’s in the painting itself, at least not at this moment, but we do know what was going on while he was painting this. This was done in 1969, the very beginning of the Occupation of Alcatraz. There are really major moments happening and we’re leading into even more moments with AIM, and Indian activists fighting it out on a national scale for the United States to become aware of the struggles of Native people at that time. And Billy “War Soldier” is a part of all of that. And for a large part of this period of time he was incarcerated.

0:04:15.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: And even when he was in jail, he was defiant. There were a number of national news articles about him because he refused to cut his hip-length hair as required by prison regulations. And he’s remembered as saying that his ancestors would make fun of him if he cut his hair, and he would rather suffer the punishment of the U.S. government than of his ancestors.

0:04:35.7 Dr. Ashley Holland: Yeah. He was willing to do the hard things. And now there is religious freedom within prisons for Indigenous incarcerated men and women that they don’t have to cut their hair because it is seen as a religious practice, and is responding to this long history of Indigenous people being forced to cut their hair. And so that is something that you bring into the legacy of this painting, that activism, that focus on defying what he understood to be against his traditional ways and then rectifying it through contemporary methods.

0:05:09.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: And I have the feeling that even if the U.S. government was trying to muzzle him, he still could speak through his art.

0:05:16.6 Dr. Ashley Holland: Absolutely. And the art lives on and will have a life beyond Bill Soza, beyond Billy “War Soldier”, beyond all of us. And that is a really wonderful thing because people will keep wondering, what is this painting doing?

0:05:45.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: This is about bravery, The Wind Only I Am Afraid Of.

This work at Art Bridges

American Civil Liberties Union, “ACLU of Southern California Wins Release for Native American Inmate Who Refused on Religious Grounds to Cut His Hair,” 2004.

Patricia Janis Broder, The American West: The Modern Vision (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984).

Nancy Marie Mithlo, editor, Making History: IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020).

Terms and issues in Native American art