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Updated Mar. 7 — Native American elders and artists often pick one tradition to focus on in their ongoing efforts to preserve and promote their tribal heritage. Learning and mastering that

John Spotted Eagle Bradley shows off his basket-weaving skills (Photo by Tessie Borden)

skill usually takes such dedication that it’s difficult to branch out. So these culture bearers dance, say, or do beadwork, or tell stories, or weave baskets, or mold pottery, or craft jewelry, or sing traditional songs.

Unless they are John Spotted Eagle Bradley, Jr. Then they do it all.

“When I was a little kid, I made a decision that I was going to learn everything I could,” said Bradley, who is Cherokee and Comanche and whose family has lived in Southern California for five generations. “My family always told me, ‘You don’t know when you’ll use it; you don’t know when you may need this knowledge, but learn it while you can.’”

Bradley this Spring is showing visitors how to play Native American games during the Autry’s American Indian Culture Days, scheduled every first Sunday of the month. The events feature a whole day’s worth of family activities that focus on Native American culture and traditions, like storytelling for children and special museum tours that focus on Native American objects.

Cradle Board making at American Indian Family Partnership (Photo by Tessie Borden)

On Sunday, Mar. 6, Bradley set up a hook and hoop race, which involves using a long, hooked branch to lob a woven hoop along a marked track, then racing to retrieve and lob it again, until the competitors reach a finish line. The first to cross it without having touched the hoop with his hands or feet wins.

“I had the great luck of being raised around a lot of people who were very culturally minded,” Bradley said the previous Wednesday at the American Indian Family Partnership (AIFP) offices in Highland Park, where he was focusing on another of his avocations: teaching young parents to make cradle boards for their children. “Everywhere I went, I always came home with something, some bit of knowledge, or new friends, or new ways. And everywhere I went I was asked either to teach or to learn. Sometimes both.”

That’s how it all started for Bradley. From the beginning, even before he knew he was consciously

Sheri Foster, storyteller for Indian Culture Days (Photo by Tessie Borden)

working to preserve Native American ways, Bradley’s mantra was “learn everything.” And because he lived in the Los Angeles area — where, although it has the nation’s largest urban Indian population, no one tribe dominates — he learned everything from everybody.

“My great blessing growing up was that I was around Pueblo Indians and Pawnees and Kiowas and Sioux and people from all over the country,” he said. “This is probably one of the only places you’ll ever see that.”

Bradley talks about drumming at the Autrys American Indian Culture Days (Photo by Danielle Klebanow)

Bradley said a federal program, the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, made it possible for members of Indian tribes across the country to move to urban areas like Southern California so they could learn vocational skills and assimilate more easily into the larger population.

“It turned out a lot of them were their culture bearers and the chiefs’ families,” Bradley said. “And they brought their dances, and their songs, and their ways, and all kinds of things. And then they all came together, and that’s where the (Southern California) Indian Center came from and the the Indian clubs we’ve had here.”

But all of this is not to say Bradley was lost in history as a boy. He grew up skateboarding with his friends, too. But he was intrigued by games he heard about from his elders and others, and by the

Bradley checks a cradle board frame at the AIFP class (Photo by Tessie Borden)

variations from tribe to tribe in the rules and the (often handmade) equipment.

He says that on his first trip to Oklahoma, while he was in college, he met Cherokee family and fellow clan members and saw people playing a Cherokee marble game. It put into context objects he had seen as a boy only behind glass cases.

“Growing up around museums and collections, I got to see a lot of stone balls,” he said. “I thought, ‘Oh, that’s really neat, but how did they use it?’”

On his return from Oklahoma, he asked his grandmother about those games, and she showed him a tribal record listing winners of the games going back several years. All of them were his cousins, close and distant.

Eventually Bradley’s interest in Native American games sparked a long-running conversation with Barbara Arvey, director of the AIFP, about a way to promote Native American games. Both have worked with the Autry for years.

A couple paints the frame for a cradle board at the AIFP class (Photo by Tessie Borden)

“We were doing some games down in my area, and she came down and saw them and liked them,” he said. “I’d really love to see where these things are revived enough to where we could have leagues.”

Like a soccer league, but with traditional games, he says.

Until then, Bradley is planning on showing kids and adults alike pursuits like plains bowling, and the hook and hoop race this weekend, and stick ball next month, and corn cob darts after that. Even when he runs out of games to teach, Bradley will just move on to another tradition. After all, it isn’t likely that he’ll run out of material.

“There’s so many different ways to be an Indian,” said Bradley,  “A lot of people say, well, you have to have feathers, and you have to dance, and this or that… and I do all that; but there’s so many other ways.”