Show notes
In this episode, we talk to Gregory Hill, a Hopi carver and toymaker. The conversation revolves around Gregory’s efforts to bring back a forgotten toy, the Patukya. His toys work to bring adults back to feeling childlike wonder, and Gregory’s efforts have even encouraged other carvers to start creating tops! ---TRANSCRIPT:--- Gregory Hill: I turned to making these because I just want to have that feeling in the world, there's just so many crazy things happening, like now. And I want to combat all the negative things in the world by creating something that's going to bring joy to the world, you know? Ranger Jonah: Hello. Welcome to Grand Canyon Speaks. My name is Ranger Jonah. Ranger Melissa: And I'm Ranger Melissa. Ranger Jonah: So, Melissa, you did this episode. Who did you do this episode with? Ranger Melissa: Yeah, I interviewed Gregory Hill, who's a Hopi toy maker. I really enjoyed this episode because he dives into this concept of work leading to play and how we all should learn to be more playful in our adult lives and reach into that inner child, which he called kid magic. It was really cool giving this interview because even during this talk, he was actually making toys while we were talking to the audience. So, it's kind of cool and you might actually hear that in the recording today. Ranger Jonah: Yeah. So, in fact, one of the things he talks about is how the toys that he makes are traditional, but recently they haven't really been made. They sort of stopped being made. It was sort of a forgotten toy. And Greg has a lot of passion for bringing this toy back, and that is just so cool. Ranger Melissa: Yeah. He even said that by making these toys, other carvers in his community are also looking to bring these toys back, which is super exciting. So, I really hope everyone enjoys this episode. Without further ado, Gregory Hill. Ranger Melissa: All right, everybody. Well, it's that time, so we're going to get started and I'm sure people will mosey on over. But my name is Melissa, I work here at Grand Canyon National Park. We have Gregory Hill right here. He is a self-proclaimed nerd I found out earlier today. He is also a twin which we just found out, which is really cool. He's from Hopi and he also makes tops. How do you say it in Hopi? Gregory Hill: In Hopi, we call it patukya. Ranger Melissa: A patukya. Gregory Hill: Patukya. The actual spinning motion of it is called riyanpi. So, riyanpi is like that spinning motion that we make. Like if you stood up and start spinning- riyanpi. But this is the toy. It's called a patukya. So, the actual toy thing is called a patukya. Ranger Melissa: Which is really exciting that we are exploring this because I also really enjoy Gregory's influence in terms of the power of play, really trying to bring play into art, which is really cool. We're going to explore this through a pilot program or a program we call Grand Canyon Speaks here where we invite people from the eleven traditionally associated tribes of Grand Canyon to share their voice and authentically be themselves with visitors like you all to Grand Canyon National Park. So, we will get started and I will start asking fun questions. And then at the end, I'll open the floor up for questions from y'all. And so, we'll kind of work through that together. My first question is, we keep saying Hopi, but could you explain where you're from and where that is located for people who might not know? Gregory Hill: Gee, where are we at now? Okay, so Flagstaff, right? The San Francisco Peaks? Hopi would be due east right here, like, maybe 63 miles. You'd come upon a place called Tuba City. So, Tuba City is, like, on the Navajo reservation, but that's, like, the edge of the border for the Hopi and Navajo Reservation. So, highway 89 runs to Tuba City, but on this side of the road is the start of the Hopi Reservation. So, you'd come upon a village called Mùnqapi. So, if you keep going east on highway 264, you'll come, like, maybe 45 minutes further east, you'll come into another village called Hotevilla. And that's situated in an area that's called, there's three mesas that the Hopi live on. So, the Hotevilla and Oraibi and the village at Kykotsmovi, those are all on the Third Mesa, which kind of juts out. So, you got, like, Hotevilla and then Oraibi, then it's like a mesa goes down. And below it is Kykotsmovi. And then, so the road goes up further into, like, maybe another 10 miles up, you'll start going up into another mesa, that's Second Mesa. So, there's three villages situated up there in, like, rocks. From afar, it looks like a mountain. You get close, you start seeing houses and stuff in there, so it really looks like a big mesa. So those are the Second Mesas. And you go further down, you get to the first mesa, which resides the consolidated villages of Polacca. First Mesa consolidated villages. Hano, Walpi, Tewa, Sichomovi. The lower villages. This village is, like, totally on a big, giant, narrow strip of rock that goes up probably like 100 ft, at least. So, I'm from the village of Kykotsmovi, which lies in, like, a valley above the village Oraibi, which is one of the oldest continuously inhabited villages in the United States. Ranger Melissa: Yeah, thanks. Gregory Hill: But yeah, you go that way. That's where I come from. Ranger Melissa: I like it. When you think of home, are there any certain sounds, sense of smell? Anything that brings up memories of home for you? Gregory Hill: Yeah, the rain smell after it rains, that wet earth smell. Mostly things that I encounter in nature remind me of home. Like, there's certain bugs that I encounter that only come out up there, know, that you don't see in the southern part of the state where I live in Scottsdale. So, there's things that I see down there that I miss from home because it's like a whole different mentality. In the city, it's like every man for themselves. But out in Hopi, it's like a community, and people help each other. Everybody come eat. It's not like, oh, you can't come eat because there's whatever. If there's not enough, we'll make enough., But yeah, there's a lot of things that remind me of home. When I was in my apprenticeship, as a butcher, I used to live in Albuquerque, so I'd get like homesick because that was like one of the first cities that I moved to as a grown up. So, I would miss home but the pueblos around there, they have ceremonies and dances and stuff and feasts. So, if I missed home a lot, I'd just go to one of the pueblos and eat and watch the dances and whatever and that really took me home. So, I didn't have a lot of angst and all of that from missing home and whatnot. Ranger Melissa: It's like a sense of community. Gregory Hill: Yeah, exactly. Ranger Melissa: That's awesome. Yeah. When you talked about your apprenticeship with being a butcher, that was before you started doing your tops. Gregory Hill: Yeah. Ranger Melissa: So, what made you switch from your long stint as a butcher to becoming an artist? Gregory Hill: I never imagined that I would be a toy maker. Artist, toy maker. It was more like a hobby to me doing this. Because butching is my passion. I can do the whole aspect of it. Nowadays there's meat cutters. So, a meat cutter is just basically cutting this muscle that's coming already separated in a big box full of other same kind of mussels. You're just cutting it up into steaks. I know how to do the whole thing from the slaughtering to the processing to doing that part of it, taking the steaks apart. So I never thought I'd be doing anything else in my whole life. I had plans for opening up like a butcher shop and like a mobile butcher shop for people that are like game hunters and whatnot. So I had big old plans for that. If I wasn't doing this, I would have been like a successful butcher shop owner right now. But this started off as a hobby. But for one thing, my OCD won't allow me to stop making them because they all have to spin exactly right. And even if I have this right now, it's like I'm not going to stop until it spins. So that's one of my problems that I have with this, making these. Because I can't stop. But I always told myself that, okay, you can be an artist for a little while, but then it's not going to be really lucrative. And it's like I'm finding that out. Yeah. It's like I have to work twice as hard as I ever would as a butcher. I work 8 hours as a butcher. I work 23 hours as a toy maker. But before it was just like something to do. But then, now as I'm learning and evolving as an artist, it turned into something different. It turned into something that I'm creating. Something that's going to bring like, mirth and joy, happiness. Like a childlike wonder is what it is. That little kid magic that we all possess, but sometimes we lose as we grow up because we stop playing. So I turned to making these because I just want to have that feeling in the world. There's just so many crazy things happening, like now, and I want to combat all the negative things in the world by creating something that's going to bring joy to the world. Gregory Hill: I think that's like a good mission to have. My mission is to recreate a dying toy and encourage the childlike mirth and others. So, I think that's like a good mission to have. I use my art to promote different conservation efforts like at the Grand Canyon. I work with the International Crane Foundation. I use my art to promote knowledge about the Whooping and Sandhill cranes, which are on the endangered species list. I work with a group that works with turtles, like the endangered species turtles into hatchings and whatnot. So, it turned into a good business for me. I started winning awards for my work. I thought that once I'm going to win an award, then that's it. I always told myself that over the years as I'm doing this. And I finally won an award. And it was funny because my brain shut off to doing this because that was it. And I couldn't think of ideas to carve for maybe three months. I was just like blank. I had like, artist block. And to me, I was like, well, you're finished, so why keep doing it? But then I had to challenge myself again, like, okay, well, you'd win this award, try to win first place. So right now, I got 1st, 2nd and 3rd place awards in my category, which is traditional arts. And I got two honorable mentions in fine art and a sculpture division. So that's different for me because I never think of this stuff as fine art or sculpture. But some of the ones that I really carve out really could be like, fine art and sculpture. My new challenge to me as toy maker and artist is to try to win more awards, like bigger awards. So that's my personal challenge. I could stop and not do it anymore. But at the same time, yeah, I'm setting my pedestal higher for myself right now. For one show that I've been attending for the past six years, I got 1st, 2nd and 3rd place. So now I just want to win the best of show, which is like the top prize. So that's my new goal as an artist, is to try to win more awards. Ranger Melissa: Right. When we were talking earlier, you said one way you have done that is, you've passed on some knowledge of how to make this with your daughter. Do you want to talk through how that came about? How did you get her interested in what you're doing? What's that like doing a father and daughter duo? Gregory Hill: Yeah. That's cool. Because this all started as a project for my little girl when she was in kindergarten. So, she would have been six, around there. She came home one day with the note and a little piece of cottonwood root. The note said that she had a pen pal in Zuni, New Mexico, which is east of us as well. As a way to share culture, the parents were instructed to create a patukya, carve out a top. At that point, I think I was into my journeymanship as a butcher, so I never carved wood before, you know? I was just carving meat all the time. But my twin brother, Jonah, he was a Katsina doll carver as I was a butcher. So, I had to go to him and borrow his carving knife. And I already knew what a top looked like in my mind because I'm a nerd and I know different toys and whatnot, but I didn't know anything about carving wood. Son my first top was really rough. I just used the knife for the whole thing and carved out the tip with this and then made a handle for it. And it was a top, but it was really rough and everything. I didn't know about rasps and files or anything like that. So, it spun, but it spun like this. It was wobbly. Yeah. And me as a nerd, I know that when a top spins, it spins straight up and down on an axis, giving enough torque to make it spin like that. So I'd be standing there cutting meat in the daytime and whatever, and just sitting there and then standing there cutting meat. But in the back of my mind, it's like it bothered me that that thing was spinning like that. So OCD kicked in, I guess. And I went back to my brother and asked him, can I learn how to carve wood from you? Nobody really knows how to make these anymore because at that point they were kind of extinct. I remember them, but I remember them when I was like a real small child and I couldn't go and ask, like, hey, man, how do you make a patukya? Because there was nobody to ask. So, what I did was went to the village and asked all the elders about them, learned that way, then took all of that knowledge and my knowledge of science, angles, height to ground ratios and all of that and put it into this. Gregory Hill: But my daughter, she was the one that really evolved from it because when she was little and I got to a point where I started being able to sell them, which I didn't really know how to do because I wasn't an artist at that point. So, we go to these different shops and my daughter, she was the demonstrator. So, she would demonstrate the method of play with using a stick and a string with the Hopi style tops. I think I can probably do it right here in the sand. Should be able to. Ranger Melissa: Ouu, a challenge. Gregory Hill: So, a Hopi style top is, like, a really simple shape. It has a tip. I learned that we had to go to a rock, like a sandstone, because that's all there is here. And grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind. I tried that one time when I was first starting out. It took me a day just to barely get, like, a little bit of a tip on there. That's why I only used hand tools, is to keep myself rooted to that aspect of it, where they had to work in order to play. But to me, it teaches craftsmanship, attention to detail, all of those good things. So, my daughter would be doing this. She'd be demonstrating. I don't think it'll work (in the sand). Ranger Melissa: Maybe get some rocks out of the way. Gregory Hill: Yeah, there you go. Yeah. She would demonstrate the method of play for the spinning top, and then nine times out of ten, that would be. . . Ranger Melissa: Could you do it on the chair? Gregory Hill: Yeah, I can do it on the chair. Yeah. So, my daughter grew up doing this, what I'm doing right now. I had to relearn how to play because we all stop playing as we grow up. So, it took me a couple of weeks to be able to learn how to play. So, you hit it and you hit it with the string, and it keeps it spinning. So, imagine like, a dozen kids all doing this at the same time. That's what I remember when I was a little kid. So, yeah, my daughter grew up, and now she's 23, she's going to be 23 in November. And I was having some he…
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