In my native Hoopa language, kiwhliw means "he who paints" First and foremost, I am a painter. I create complex, richly colorful compositions. I am also Native American, raised on the Hoopa Valley Reservation in Northern California.

As a young child, I began drawing the stories I could see in my Hoopa Valley landscape and those told to me by my elders. When my family moved off the reservation to Oregon, which has been my home ever since, I attended my local public schools and started to hear a new set of stories that seemingly had no connection to my own - the stories told in the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Francis Bacon, and Jackson Pollock. I began painting and found in the process a way to weave together the stories of my homeland, the history others tell about my people, and the mystery I find in the work of artists who came before me. I often begin with an archival photograph of Native Americans, typically one the photographer often intended as a "document of a vanishing race." I re-contextualize the often static, sometimes staged portraits with layers of color, traditional native design and landscapes real and imagined. I often include contemporary cultural imagery in my work as a reminder that Native people are here today.