Patrick Pynes

CP-LUHNA author: Chuska Mountains and Defiance Plateau, Navajo Nation

Patrick Pynes is a North American of mixed ethnic ancestry. His matrilineal and patrilineal ancestors were living in the Carolinas before the American Revolution. Their ancestors came to eastern North America from Ireland, England, Germany, and Poland. After the Revolution, his maternal antecedents moved from North Carolina to Northern Alabama, near the Tennessee border. At the same time, his paternal antecedents moved from South Carolina to Southern Alabama, near the Florida border. The Northern Alabama branch (Huddleston) intermarried with Cherokees and moved to Southwest Arkansas during the Indian Removal Era of the 1830s, and then migrated again to South Texas during the late 1880s. The Southern Alabama branch (Pynes) moved to the piney woods of far northeast Texas, also during the late 1880s.

Pynes was born in Victoria, Texas, about seventy years after these migrations, and grew up there and in Georgia, Maryland, and California. About half of his first fourteen years were spent living in the Panama Canal Zone, Mexico City, and Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where his father served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army, in between tours of duty in Saigon and Seoul. His mother, a Cherokee descendant, is an opera singer (soprano) now living in Vienna, Austria. His younger brother Tim, also a singer, lives with his wife Jeanine in Denver, while his younger sister, Caroline, a trumpet player, lives in Austin, Texas.

From ages six to seventeen, Pynes attended twelve different public and private schools in three states and three foreign nations. He has attended and/or taught courses in writing, literature, American Studies, Native American Studies, Environmental Studies, and Southwest Studies at Texas Christian University, Trinity University (San Antonio, Texas), Oklahoma State University, Texas Tech University, the University of Tennessee, Walters State Community College (Tennessee), the University of New Mexico, Highline Community College (Washington state), and, at present, Northern Arizona University, where he does research for the Center for Sustainable Environments and teaches part-time for the Applied Indigenous Studies Program. He earned a B.A. in Latin American History and American Literature/Creative Writing from Trinity University, where he lettered twice for the Trinity Tiger baseball team, playing third base. His M.A. is in American Literature/Rhetoric/CreativeWriting from Texas Tech. In May 2000, Pynes earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico, completing a dissertation about the cultural/natural effects of commercial timber harvesting in the Navajo Nation's ponderosa pine forests. It was passed with distinction.

Pynes is married to Lisa Caye Kirkwood, who has a B.A. in Spanish from Texas Tech. They were high school classmates in Lampasas, Texas, but did not know one another. Five years after they first met one another at a five-year class reunion, they were married on former Cherokee lands in the Bays Mountains, near Knoxville, Tennessee. Kirkwood and Pynes have three daughters: Carson, age 10, Jordan (Zia), age 7, and Shannon, age 4. All are avid readers, writers, and soccer players. They also share a passion for macaroni and cheese. Besides being a full-time father and husband, Pynes enjoys organic gardening, beekeeping, hiking, and studying the Navajo and Cherokee languages. He is currently the Cross-cultural Specialist with the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University.