Have You Heard?

About the middle of January we went to the Heard Museum. It’s a large museum that focuses on Native American art and artifacts. That’s about all we knew about it before we arrived. It turned out to be a really cool place except for one thing…

The museum houses a vast collection of stuff acquired by Dwight B. and Maie Bartlett Heard in the course of their travels around the southwest and around the world. Since they established it in 1929 others have continued to donate to the collection making it eight times the size it originally was. Now, by this point we have been to enough places that we have seen quite a lot of corn-grinding stones, bits of pottery and woven blankets. The Heard collection had all of the too, but what made it different was that it also houses an impressive collection of modern art by living Native artists. So alongside the ancient Zuni pots pulled from the dust of some cave somewhere are modern pieces with more dynamic glazes and bolder shapes, but with the same kinds of designs. You can see the motifs in use now and the heritage they come from on the same shelf. That is neat. The permanent collection exhibits artifacts and describes the lifestyle of each tribal group that lives in southwest as part of a massive gallery called “Home.”

One of the temporary exhibits that we saw was called “Life in a Cold Place.” It was a collection of modern-day art from Inuit artists in Canada and Greenland. In the 1950s the Canadian government promoted the production of art as a way for the people recently collected (forced) into settled communities to make some money. The idea took hold and several artistic lineages were established turning out lots and lots of paintings, prints and sculptures for consumption by tourists. As it turns out, the Inuit aesthetic in two dimensions is just not that appealing to us. Most of the pictures of people running about in the snow or hunting or dancing just weren’t that interesting. The three-dimensional art on the other hand was very interesting. The stylized human form looks interesting when rendered as an object. A lot of the small soapstone carvings we saw had a distinctly Asian look to them. Imagine one of those rotund Buddhas in a fur-fringed parka. Maya’s favorite piece from the gallery was a stone carving of a man hunting a seal and a woman fishing. The artist rendered both the people above the ice and the animals below. Very cool.

Next to this gallery was a smallish one containing a few items from around the world: feather headdresses from New Zealand, jewelry from Africa, a blanket from Hawaii… It was in this room that we encountered our third tour group. The Heard Museum really, really, really likes tours. When we had first come in we were looking at the map trying to decide which gallery to visit first and we asked by a docent if we wanted to join a tour that was forming up. No, thank you. Then a different docent asked if we needed the map explained to us. No, thank you, we can read it ourselves. So he sat down next to us and proceeded to explain the map to us anyway! While this was going on we heard one docents at the welcome stand talking about it being about time to round everyone up for the tour. Later after we had escaped from the map-explained we met the lady rounding everyone up. NO, thank you, we’d like to go at our own speed. So in the Around the World gallery when me met yet another tour group with the lady loudly shuffling her charges past the headdresses and the cradle boards at breakneck speed it was something of a camelback-breaking straw. Can’t we look at the museum on our own? We paid our fee! Let us wonder! Don’t tell us where to go first and don’t tell us what your favorite thing is like you’re letting us in on a great secret. We’ll see it all in our own good time! At least no one was giving us the evil eye just for being there like often happens at the Speed Art Museum.

The museum wasn’t all neat art and crafty artifacts. In “Remembering Our Indian School Days” the museum has a very informative and well-presented gallery about the experience of the Indian School system. Guided by such enlightened principles as “It’s cheaper to educate Indians than to kill them” the Indian Schools may be the worst thing that the White Man ever did to the Indian. Maybe. The attempts by the teachers, administrators and government functionaries to eliminate all the “native” from their charges and graduate productive “Americanized” citizens were documented in an immersive way. The room was set up like a series of classrooms each focusing on a different aspect of life in the Indian School program. Copious photographs from the heydays of the schools cover the walls and you are surrounded by video and audio clips of grown folks remembering their days at school. Native legends were discarded in favor of white versions of Indians. Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha was compulsory reading but children were not allowed to speak in their native tongues. Names were changed, hair was cut, and visits home were out of the question. Of course, in the end, the schools failed in their attempt to entirely eliminate Native cultures (hard as they might have tried). The government knew it too. Control of schools on reservations was relinquished to the tribe that the school “served.” Some were closed immediately and others were turned into centers of solidarity and pride for their students and alumni. Even so, only one of the dozens of former schools is still in operation. Those schools not on reservation land were disposed of in various ways, some quite recently. Although the educational program had dropped its assimilation aspects, Phoenix’s own Phoenix Indian School operated until up until 1990 when the value of the land was judged to be irresistibly high. Some of the grounds remain as a city park and funds are being raised to turn the buildings into some kind of museum and Indian cultural center.

On a lighter note, we walked through the children’s activity center part of the museum. There we tried on a replica canoe for size. Matt also picked up a pattern to make a humming bird mobile. He hasn’t made it yet though. We also looked at an instillation of art by one Tony Abeyta. He’s of both Navajo and Anglo descent and in his work he uses thread from both. That was a theme we saw a lot in the modern art on display throughout the museum. The works are modern and yet they have these resonances with other images that are very traditional for specific cultures. The artist says that his current work uses abstracted images of the Navajo underworld to show the relationship between the modern world and the rest of the cosmos. So there you have it.