the peaceful peacock

Remem­ber when I told you about this?

I have an idea.  And it involves a lit­tle good natured mis­chief:

and an old tradition:

The only time I ever heard Ernie lament about being par­a­lyzed was when we would pass by the statue of John Boze­man, found­ing father of our fair city.  He would say, “You know, if I could walk for a day the first thing I would do is dance on his grave.”

Cheers, Ernie.  I’ve got a good one for you.

>click on images for sources<

ernie, Ernie Pepion, native american heritage

I think it’s time to start telling you about my friend Ernie.

Ernie was a man that I had the solid, good for­tune of spend­ing about a year get­ting to know when I worked as one of his per­sonal care atten­dants.  In a nut­shell, Ernie was an artist, a Black­feet Indian, a col­lec­tor of jokes, and a patient and devoted teacher.  He was also quadra­palegic.  I’m not going to get into a lot of detail about him today–there’s just so much to say about him that we’ll just con­sider this the intro­duc­tion of a very long tale.

For some basic back­ground, Ernie was born on the Black­feet Reser­va­tion in Mon­tana in 1943.  Though he sur­vived two tours of duty in Viet­nam with­out inci­dent, it was a car acci­dent that caused the injury to his spinal cord that sen­tenced him to a life­time in a wheel­chair.  It was dur­ing his recov­ery in a VA hos­pi­tal that Ernie met Bill, a man whose fate was much worse than Ernie’s.  Bill lived in an iron lung.  Ernie always said it was pretty tough to feel sorry for your­self when the guy next to you was only allowed out in “the real world” for an hour each day.

Dur­ing this hour of free­dom, Bill would paint.

And it was Bill who intro­duced Ernie to the world of art.  Ernie was for­tu­nate to have lat­eral move­ment of his arms (he could move them side to side) which granted him a sub­stan­tial amount of free­dom despite his injury.  He also had one of the most pos­i­tive and relaxed approaches to life that I’ve ever wit­nessed.  To skip ahead a few years, Ernie obtained both his Bach­e­lors of Fine Arts and his Mas­ters of Fine Arts from Mon­tana State Uni­ver­sity.  His jour­ney into art is the type of thing that leg­ends are born from, and I can assure you that he deserves the honor of being called a Master.

Ernie always had a way of look­ing at the world from every angle–he had to.  In order to cre­ate his oil paint­ings, Ernie used an easel (spe­cially designed for him by the MSU engi­neer­ing depart­ment) that rotated 360 degrees.  This meant that not only could this quadra­palegic man paint, he could paint side­ways and upside down.  And they weren’t small paintings–in his prime he was paint­ing pieces that mea­sured up to 10 feet by 8 feet.  When I saw them they were casu­ally stacked against a wall in his hum­ble low income apart­ment off of Grand Avenue.  When most peo­ple saw them they were hung with honor on the walls of pres­ti­gious gal­leries in North Amer­ica, Europe, and Japan.

After some search­ing, I was able to find one of the paint­ings from his Red Man series:

This piece is called Buf­falo Hunter and mea­sures 47“x52”.  A lot of the inspi­ra­tion for Ernie’s art­work came to him in dreams, a means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion that I believe he still uses.  The sub­ject mat­ter of his work always let his sense of humor shine through, as you can see from the wooden horse between his legs.  As Ernie would say, “Because every cow­boy needs a horse.”  Ernie died in Jan­u­ary of 2005 after return­ing to his native Black­feet home.

And that’s a short his­tory of the life of Ernie Pepion.  I always promised him that we’d write a book about his life and I’d like to think of this as the begin­ning of that process.  So cheers, Ernie.  Have a Bud Light for me.

Ernie Pepion