Allan Houser was born in 1914 and raised on a farm with peach and apple trees, where he fished and swam, helped tend the livestock and harvested corn, cotton, oats, and wheat. Later he would recall “beautiful memories of the farm” and the Apache objects his parents made by hand: bead and leather work, deerskin clothing, and wooden carvings. In 1920 he began public grade school in Boone, Oklahoma, and in 1922 he spent a miserable year at the Fort Sill Indian School, which was military in nature. In all such Indian schools in those years students were Americanized by having their long hair cut short; they were punished for speaking their Native language; their names were Anglicized; and for infractions of the many severe rules they were jailed. From 1923-28 Houser was again enrolled at the Boone Public School, where he excelled in sports such as boxing and football, but not in academics.

Even as a youngster, he was precociously talented at drawing and carving, and he might have developed his art skills further in high school, but after one unhappy year at the military-style Chilocco Indian School, which his mother had attended, his aging father brought him home to work on the farm. Like many other Oklahoma Indian youths, both then and now, Houser spent his teenage years working with his father, fishing, playing baseball, and dancing and socializing at Native tribal gatherings called Pow Wows. But about 1933-34 he once again demonstrated an interest in drawing pictures of Apache subjects and was “advised by his father about details of traditional Apache clothing and equipment” in order that his work be accurate. As he later recalled, “I was 20 years old when I finally decided that I really wanted to paint. I had learned a great deal about my tribal customs from my mother and my father, and the more I learned the more I wanted to put it down on canvas or something. That’s pretty much how it started.

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