Robert
Boissiere

A PASSION FOR POETRY

Honored July, 1991

Robert Boissiere

Crossing the enormous distance in miles and between cultures, Robert Boissiere followed his lifelong fascination with Native American people. He lived on the Hopi Reservation in the Arizona desert.

By his seventies, the Frenchman was able to say he was "more Hopi than white man." His search for his "missing" Indian self led him to become an intermediary between the Indian and non-Indian worlds.

Born in Paris in 1914, Robert was educated as a lawyer and twice decorated for valor while serving with the French Army in World War II. During the war, he was taken prisoner by the Germans but escaped after a year and a half. He headed west in 1946, as soon as the war ended.