Tuesday, September 1st, 2009
WHEELS OF FORTUNE
BY SAM POLCER
PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRENDAN MOORE
Douglas Miles, the man behind Apache Skateboards, believes that the San Carlos Apache kids on his company’s team are no different from other skaters.
“Skateboarding appeals to my kids for the same reason that it appeals to all kids: It’s fun,” he says. “As skateboarders, they are no different. The only thing that makes them different from other kids is that they are from tribal backgrounds.”
That said, living on reservations—in many cases far away from the nearest sanctioned skate park— has been an obstacle in turning the tribe members on to the sport. But for all good skaters, obstacles are the stuff dreams are made of.
“I’m not saying our kids love it more,” Miles says. “But kids in the suburbs of California’s Orange County, for example, see pro skateboarders, skate demos and that kind of stuff every day. They have nice skate parks to go to because they’re close to the city. The majority of my kids, however, are living in kind of isolated regions, skating in obscurity and still having fun and reclaiming their environment through skateboarding, so what they get out of it might be different.”
Miles, in addition to founding the company, is an artist whose historical and contemporary portraits of Native Americans grace the boards his company makes as well as the walls of galleries in New York and Los Angeles. He believes that the greatest asset that skateboarding—and the culture surrounding the sport—provides his kids, many of whom get to travel around the country to various events, is that it provides a way for them to express themselves. “Skateboarding provides an outlet for them to be creative in film, photography and art,” he says. “And, of course, they’re very into how they can express their own personal style through skateboarding. That’s kind of endless. And while he insists that his kids are no different, Miles sees a connection between the tribal nature of skating and Native American culture.
“I don’t mean that everyone who skateboards is Indian or that Indians invented skateboarding,” he says. “What my kids are doing is almost exactly the same thing that kids are doing in Orange County or in Brooklyn. But skateboarding has its own rites of passage, its own social mores and its own codified terminology. And they all speak that language.”
