A Walk in the Woods with Murv Jacob

Interviewing Murv Jacob is like walking backward through the woods while he walks forward right beside you at a quick and steady pace. Keeping up with him in this way is a challenge. You have to trust he knows where he is going—at times in spite of his tremendous imagination, lightning wit, and bizarre sense of humor. He makes connections between ideas so quickly, sidestepping obvious answers and averting predictable conclusions, that your own assumptions about the path your discussion will take immediately give way to the task of reaching the next clearing with him. Yet, he always gets you there. It's a rewarding, if peculiar adventure to say the least.

Brian Hudson and I met up with Murv and his partner, Deborah Duvall, at the Tribes 131 Gallery in Norman, Oklahoma, in the early afternoon of March 27, 2011. Tribes 131 features a fantastic array of Oklahoma's Native artists and provides a rich representation of Indigenous peoples and cultural aesthetics in the state and surrounding region. Murv's work is included in the collection. Gallery owner Leslie Zinbi welcomed us that day—as she does all gallery visitors—into the dynamic space she creates there. She graciously cleared a table for us and helped us set up various recording equipment for the interview. She enjoyed watching Murv work his way through our list of questions. It was obvious they were old friends.

Early on in the process of putting together the special issue, Brian solicited advice from me in identifying a Cherokee artist whose work would be appropriate to include. Next to natural landscapes, animals are a hallmark of Murv Jacob's paintings. I have admired Murv's art for many years. If you spend any time in Cherokee Country, you'll find his work in a wide variety of places—on pottery, in children's books, on T-shirts, in public murals, and in private collections, to name a few. The lines, colors, and dimension in his artwork—in addition to the subject matter—work together to illuminate the cultural sensibilities of an intimately Cherokee perspective.

In every trip to Tahlequah, I'd find myself staring intently after hours into the front window of the Murv Jacob Gallery on North Muskogee Avenue. Just as beautiful as the pieces he paints there, the gallery testifies to Murv's amazing productivity as an artist. It is obviously a space where creative work and Cherokee culture happens. To the side of the gallery is a mural, Murv's own Indigenous version of Tahlequah's would-be city seal: two brown bears shaking hands in the midst of a forest, surrounded by a circle of Kituwah mound designs. Inside the circle and above the bears appear the words "two is enough"—derived from the Tsalagi words for "two" (tali) and "enough" (yeligwu), from which the town's name originates. The image is both delightful art and Native politics. Who wouldn't want to meet this person? Now I had an opportunity.

Together Brian and I generated a list of questions that seemed germane to both the SAIL special issue's focus on animal studies and to the general interests of SAIL readers. The answers we got from Murv, transcribed in the interview that follows, forge an undeniable impression of him as someone spirited enough to spontaneously agree to create a piece of art for the issue. Murv painted Animal Stomp for us on his own accord, seemingly just because we asked him nicely if he had something we might use. Like the painting, the interview is at once jovial and dark, simple and powerful, strange and straightforward, and brilliantly animated—all the while presenting the vision of an Aniyvwiya'i artist.

Murv's recent book project, which he mentions early in the interview, is the now-published Secret History of the Cherokees, coauthored with Deborah L. Duvall and James Murray and published by Indian Territory Press (2011). It is a well-researched historical novel that tells the story of the Cherokees "in a way it has never been told before." The book moves through...