DR. WEST: ...I was born in California because my father was stationed in the military during World War II in California. But right after California we moved back to Oklahoma. It's actually where I was raised. And my father is from the Southern Cheyenne/Arapahoe tribe of Oklahoma, as are my brother and I. And we were raised in that community in Oklahoma during the late '40s, '50s and early '60s. So that's really where we did grow up.

My mother was actually not Native. She was the musician and my father was an artist, a visual artist, a sculptor. And out of that marriage came my brother and me. One who went off to become a banker, my brother went off to become a banker, and I went off to become a lawyer, which I was originally. My parents couldn't quite understand what went wrong. But it all came back around in the end, and I ended up at the National Museum of the American Indian.