NORTHRIDGE : Apache Visits Pupils to Show a Truer Image

Bryan Bright Cloud stood in the classroom with arms outstretched, buckskin fringe dripping from his sleeves and two small pelts clutched in his hands.

“Does anybody know what these are?”

Gasps of recognition and tiny hands shot through the air. “RABBITS!” “BUNNIES!” children shouted.

Bright Cloud, an Apache, raised a thick mottled gray rabbit fur in his right hand. “This guy’s from Canada where they have fierce winters,” he said.

He raised his left hand and a thin-furred white pelt.

“This guy’s from California. He just needs a filter for the smog.”

Call him an Apache with an L. A. attitude.

Bright Cloud, who moved to Northridge seven years ago from Arizona, spent Wednesday at Darby Avenue Elementary School, speaking to the 500 or so children herded in and out of his show-and-tell shop of handcrafted weapons, skins and stories.

In his long, fringed buckskin pants and shirt, with a choker made of deer bone, and a headdress made of 31 red and white feathers, the 38-year-old actor looked like he could have walked off a Hollywood set.

But the cartoonish Hollywood image of Native Americans is just what Bright Cloud is trying to change.

He’s probably heard all the stereotypes--including taunts from parents and children when he worked at Knott’s Berry Farm.

Children and adults would walk up to him at the park and say “Ugh.” Or they’d boast, “Hey, we can speak Indian. ‘How.’ ”

Once, Bright Cloud remembered, he walked up to a small child when the father, trying to frighten the child, shouted, “Watch out! That’s an Indian. He’s going to kill you and then he’s going to scalp you.”

Bright Cloud travels to schools--he visited 26 last year--to give young children a truer image of Native Americans than what they see in cartoons, Westerns and even some history books.

Mixing Apache facts and pop culture, Bright Cloud tried to bridge the history gap for the young pupils.

“About 150 to 200 years ago the Indians who lived in this country didn’t have Sears,” said Bright Cloud, who played a Native American nurse on the television show “Rachel Gunn, R. N.”

“They couldn’t go down to the 7-Eleven and get a Big Gulp when they were thirsty.”

To be an Apache warrior, he told them, children had to rise before the sun each morning and run so that when they reached 17, they could run 70 miles in 24 hours, he said.

“That’s like running to Disneyland, you guys.”