POWAY —— Before Johnny Bear Contreras got the city's permission to exhibit his sculptures at Poway City Hall, he said he got permission from the land's original owners.

For more than 6,500 years, his Kumeyaay people occupied the land known to them as Pauwai. Contreras' bronzed sculptures depict his native peoples as they lived, worked and prayed in the area now named Poway.

Two of Contreras' life-sized sculptures were unveiled at City Hall in October and will be permanent displays; five others were loaned to the city in June to exhibit for an indefinite time. City Councilman Bob Emery, who used $99,000 from his city discretionary account to pay for the creation and installation of the two permanent displays, said the art honors Poway's past.

"Poway is the only city in the county with a name derived from an Indian word," he said. "I thought it was important to display our Indian heritage here. We were an Indian village area long before the white man came here."

Even the way the sculptures were made and displayed followed time-honored Kumeyaay spiritual traditions, Contreras said last week.

Moving artifacts from their original location or capturing a religious ceremony in writing, a photograph or sculpture is considered culturally inappropriate without spiritual cleansing through various religious rituals.

"It was done in a good way," he said, using an American Indian saying that means he followed traditional protocols. "I came to the land and paid respect to the land before I even talked about what I was going to do."

But the bronzed images aren't just historical, Contreras said. They are contemporary because they show the work, dance and spiritual practices the Kumeyaay people still practice today.

In Contreras' sculpture "Seeing," a muscular Kumeyaay man, wearing a traditional warrior dressed of eagle feathers around his waist, stands 6 feet tall on a 3-foot pedestal in front of City Hall. With his right hand extended up and his left holding a traditional bird-song gourd rattle, the sculpture depicts a spiritual journey, Contreras said. Under the sculpture are the words "Emaay Ehaa Keypina" or "Creator Hear Me."

Contreras has been on his own spiritual and professional journey, he said. Born in San Diego in 1963, he was raised and still lives on the San Pasqual Indian Reservation in Valley Center, where the Kumeyaay were forced to move about 100 years ago. He was the youngest in a family of 10 children who lived in impoverished conditions.

The self-taught artist couldn't afford formal art education, he said, until he sold a couple of pieces for $30 and $40 at the Off Track Gallery in Leucadia in 1993.

"It was a hard time so that was a lot of money for me," Contreras said. "I studied (bronzing) at Palomar College after I did two public commissions so I could afford classes."

Today, his pieces go for $28,000 to $100,000 each and he was recently named to the board of the California Center for the Arts, Escondido.

But his work is more than a means of living, he said, it's a way of educating the public about its heritage, native and non-native alike.

"If you call yourself an American, it's where your American came from," Contreras said.

He added that he wants his art to break down negative stereotypes of American Indians historically portrayed in Hollywood media.

For example, Contreras said, "Seeing" is not an image one would have commonly seen on film. "The only thing we had in our hands was a bottle of booze or a war drum," he said.

Women, he said, have also been depicted in a negative or incorrect way.

"Settling Woman," he said, was made to honor Kumeyaay women. The sculpture sits at the entrance of the City Hall courtyard. In her lap she holds a hand-woven basket used to gather wild plants and acorns. Next to her is a boulder, called a metate, with numerous indentations that women traditionally used as bowls for grinding food with a hand-held stone.

The boulder measures about 15 feet by 18 feet and weighs 48,000 pounds, Contreras said. It was discovered during the construction of Scripps Poway Parkway in 1996 and was moved "in a good way," Contreras said, to City Hall.

Another sculpture, upstairs inside City Hall, is named "Fancy Shaw Dancer." On a marble base stands a 2-foot tall image of a strong, nude mother with firm breasts dancing with a traditional shawl behind her. In reality, Contreras said, she would have clothes on but the image was done to show the beauty of Native American women.

"I thought, 'When was the last time I saw a Native American nude done tastefully.' Never," Contreras said. "I want things to be depicted in an accurate way; that's what I'm striving to do."

Contact staff writer Adrienne A. Aguirre at (760) 740-3526 or aaguirre@nctimes.com.

Kumeyaay Indian sculptures

Artist: Johnny Bear Contreras

Where: Poway City Hall, 13325 Civic Center Drive.