ALL IN A DAY'S WORK

ALL IN A DAY'S WORK By Kathy Montgomery Photographs by Paul Markow

Douglas Miles is busy. In the space of a few weeks, he's crisscrossed the country to paint a mural in Cincinnati and flown to the University of Missouri for a screening of Apache Leap, which made its debut in the Portland Film Festival. Miles played a starring role in addition to co-producing the feature film. Soon, he'll be back home on the San Carlos Apache Tribe's land, where Miles will be supporting his son, Douglas Jr., and his crew while they produce a short film. Then he'll travel to Miami for a mural commission in the Wynwood district, which boasts work by some of the world's best-known street artists. But today, accompanied by two young artists and a box of spray paints, he faces a large, blank canvas on Arizona State University's Tempe campus. Miles describes himself as an artist, photographer, curator, writer, muralist, public speaker and director. Museums around the country, including the National Museum of the American Indian and the Institute of American Indian Arts, have collected his work. His public art includes murals on San Carlos Apache land, along with works in San Francisco, the Bronx and New Orleans.

But Miles may be best known as the founder of Apache Skateboards, one of the country's first Indigenous-owned skateboard companies. With a long history among American Indians, skateboarding is riding a wave of popularity boosted by its debut last year as an Olympic sport. Apache Skateboards' umbrella includes a skate team led by Douglas Jr., apparel, photography and film.

In 2019, National Geographic selected the documentary The Mystery of Now, which Miles co-wrote and co-produced, for its short-film showcase. The 16-minute film features Miles, Douglas Jr. and skateboarders on San Carlos Apache land.

"I'm multidisciplinary and multifaceted," Miles says. "Sometimes there's a focus on our filmmaking. Sometimes I'll focus on Apache Skateboards. Sometimes a mural project opens up. I started a skateboard company, but I got into public art, got into film and photography. Just a lot of work that I create."

And now, Miles is at ASU, as the first artist in residence for the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies. It's a position the school's director, Richard Amesbury, created to bring Miles to ASU, which claims to graduate more American Indian students than any other university in the United States. "Art has a powerful way of shaping the context of higher education," Amesbury says. "It signals to the viewer something about what we value and who we value."

Miles will spend the next few days painting a mural for the school's reception area.

Miles grew up in and around South Phoenix, where he began drawing Batman and other comic book characters as a child. As he got older, he became interested in street art influenced by graffiti artists and the lowrider culture of the 1970s. But he also had a strong sense of his Apache and Akimel O'odham heritage via frequent visits to family members on San Carlos Apache and Gila River lands.

Although he attended graphic design school hoping to earn a living making art, Miles instead got a job at Motorola. "I didn't have confidence in my work," he says. "My mom would tell me, 'You need to sell your work, sell your artwork.' [My family] kept encouraging me, took me to art shows and art markets. They kind of pushed me, in a good way."

Those efforts paid off. In 1996, Miles' Prismacolor, pen and ink drawing Apache Brothers earned a first-place award at the Santa Fe Indian Market. It's now part of the Eddie Basha Collection. But Miles' art career took an unexpected turn in 2001, when Douglas Jr. wanted a skateboard. Miles couldn't afford a name brand, so he bought a blank deck and painted an Apache warrior on it. "A hundred years ago, I would have made my son a bow and arrow," he explained in a YouTube video. "But now, I'm making him a skateboard."

When Douglas Jr. came home from school and said all his friends wanted a deck like his, Miles got the idea for a brand that would represent Indigenous people with Indigenous art. “I call that Apache Skateboards’ creation story,” he says. By then, he was living in San Carlos and producing and selling fine art. But fine art is expensive. Miles saw skateboards as a way to make art more accessible — not only to collectors, but also to kids. Employing what he calls “the power of the past,” he designed decks incorporating historical images of Apache warriors to remind Indigenous kids of their tribal heroes. “Tribal kids are already proud,” he says. And he believed Apache Skateboards would add to that pride. Social media, then still in its infancy, helped the company find a wider audience — and, in some ways, Miles’ life would never be the same. “I started Apache Skateboards, and then I started a skate team,” he recalls. “Then we started getting invited to do skate demos for different tribal communities. We were asked to go to different reservations, and we were working with youths.” What people don’t know, he adds, is that while pursuing a career in fine arts, Miles was also working full time in San Carlos, doing social work with the tribe. He’d go into com-