Artist’s statues honor Indians in 50 states
EDGEWATER (AP) – Follow the Trail of the Whispering Giants in all 50 states to discover Peter Wolf Toth’s life story.
Number 27: A 43-foot, hand-carved Native American piece is a museum landmark in Desert Hot Springs, Calif.
Number 57: An 18-foot monument makes its home off a road in Astoria, Ore.
Prefer something closer to home? Wolf’s 10th statue is in Punta Gorda, where an Indian brave and maiden emerge from a dead tree stump measuring more than 20 feet high.
There are 73 statues that honor indigenous people. Even at age 61, he continues to plan for more.
Considering himself a tool, just like his hammer and chisel, Toth doesn’t like to talk about himself. He lets the statues speak for themselves.
“I am just a person trying to honor maligned people,” said Toth, who talks slowly, almost laboriously as he describes his purpose, with eyes closed behind tinted spectacles.
Back at home in Edgewater, where a sampling of small statues and carvings beckon visitors to his U.S. 1 gallery, the father of two teenage daughters works on some of his “insignificant little pieces.”
A chaotic, open-air, personal museum is dotted with wizards, fish, dolphins, dragons, and historical pieces made from the same wood as his massive statues. Sales of these items supplement his “real work,” which is found everywhere else but here.
Toth’s mission to honor Native Americans and oppressed people began in 1971, taking him beyond the U.S. to Canada, and most recently to his native Hungary, where he carved a Whispering Giant along the Danube River last summer.
“I’ve worked for people that have faced injustice and it was always my dream to utilize my God-given talent to specifically help the American Indians, who I feel have been victims of injustice,” Toth said. “But my work goes way beyond the Native Americans; it’s centrally for humanity.”
He considers the atrocities American Indians have faced, such as the Trail of Tears – the more than 1,000-mile journey that about 100,000 were forced to make in the 1830s when they were removed from their ancestral homelands in the Deep South and resettled on reservation land in Oklahoma.
While it may sound odd that a man with no American Indian relatives has dedicated his art to them, Toth, who is from the Magyar tribe of Hungary, is also no stranger to injustice and the loss of a homeland.
Born behind the Iron Curtain, he was one of 11 children raised in a dirt-floor peasant home. His father, who taught him about wood carving, farmed a family property until the communists stole it.