Road Trip 5 -- in Phoenix

 

Road Trip 5 – in Phoenix

1.

Julie asks me to buy her an Indian pot.  

According to a Phoenix life-style weekly, “the best place in the valley to buy Indian art” is at the Heard Museum of the American Indian.  So I find my way to the museum, look at the exhibits and, then, walk across the Spanish-style courtyard to the annex where Indian arts and crafts are on sale.

The museum is chaotic, galleries haphazardly arranged around several small courtyards.  To reach some exhibits, you must walk for hundreds of feet through chilly corridors in which the adjacent galleries are all closed.  Grandiloquent flights of marble steps lead to a second floor where most of the rooms are cold and dark.  The core exhibits near the entrance are installed in dark galleries that lead nowhere; you end up walking in circles, encountering the same artifacts over and over again.  A special show displays yard-high dolls with elaborate jewelry and regalia.  There are cases full of pots and a dark, spooky gallery in which kachinas grimace and posture, half-crouched as if dancing with bent knees in the gloom.  These objects, all beaked and feathery like taxidermied birds, were collected by Barry Goldwater, erstwhile Arizona senator and candidate for president.  (According to a wall label, the kachinas appear to admonish people to right conduct, that is, to not be ughopi – that is, “not Hopi”.)  In the middle of this maze, there’s a woven basket in which a stick man raises his hands up in a “don’t shoot” gesture at the center of labyrinth of forking paths – this is a culture-hero to the Tohono O’odham, the so-called “man in the maze” pattern, an image, it seems, of the human condition.

On the second floor, at the end of a hallway that crooks around a courtyard, there’s a continuing exhibition on Federal Indian Schools.  This is a show which I’ve seen during previous visits to the Heard Museum – it has remained on display for, at least, five years.  The subject of Federal Indian Schools is relevant and close to home in the Valley.  A principal thoroughfare in Scottsdale, unavoidable if you drive in that part of the city, is called Indian School Road.  The exhibit is melancholy but balanced.  Not all Indian children experienced the schools as unmitigated misery and cultural deprivation.  In fact, many graduates of these schools have fond memories of their time at these places.  There are big murals of marching bands and successful basketball teams.  And, in fact, the schools gathered together Native American children from many disparate tribes, resulting in a sort pan-Indian ethnic consciousness that has had important political and social implications.  But, of course, there was abuse, cruelty, and loneliness.  In one case, there are child-sized handcuffs, supposedly used to detain unruly students.  The provenance of the baby handcuffs is a bit unclear and the label evinces slight skepticism as to whether the object is real or some kind of sinister toy.  One hopes that the handcuffs aren’t authentic.

An important figure in the Indian School show is Angel De Cora.  Winnebago (or Ho-Chunk), she was born in the small village of Thurston, Nebraska on the reservation.  Her father was a chief and her mother a French woman.  A White man came to the village and asked the six-year-old girl if she and her friends wanted to ride on a “steam wagon” – that is, on a railroad car.  She agreed and, on that ruse, was taken for three years to an Indian School.  When she finally returned home to Nebraska, her father had died and she wrote in her memoirs that “the old Indian ways were gone.”  De Cora was a talented artist.  She trained at the Chicago Art Institute and became a special protegee to the illustrator Howard Pyle who pronounced her a genius.  She had been educated at Smith College, an elite women’s liberal arts college at Northhampton, Massachusetts and, later, taught art at the famous Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.  (There she first encountered “Lone Star” Dietz, a team-mate of Jim Thorpe, whom she later married after meeting him again at the St. Louis World’s Fair.  “Lone Star” Dietz, despite claiming to be half-Dakota, was probably a full-blooded German; Dietz had attended Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota before transferring to the Carlisle Indian School, probably for the purpose of playing football on scholarship.  Dietz, a controversial figure, was indicted for draft-dodging in December 1918 – he had claimed exemption from the draft on the basis of registering as a “Non-Citizen - Indian with allotment”.  A trial in Spokane, Washington in Federal Court resulted in a hung jury; after a second trial, Dietz was convicted and spent 30 days in jail.  The legal issue was not whether Dietz was Native American but whether he reasonably believed himself to be an Indian notwithstanding the fact that he was not.  Dietz successfully coached football both professionally and for college teams through the late thirties; he also was an artist and exhibited with some success.  He is buried under a headstone that says “William ‘Lone Star’ Dietz born in South Dakota” – in fact, he was born in Rice Lake, Wisconsin.)  De Cora taught at the Indian School in Scottsdale for several years and was warmly remembered by her students.  She divorced Dietz in 1919 and went to visit friends in Northhampton associated with Smith College.  There she contracted pneumonia and died.  There is a small museum featuring some of her colorful paintings in Thurston, Nebraska on the Winnebago reservation.  At that museum, she is heralded as an artist, art teacher, and “boarding school survivor.”

One of the large paintings installed in the Boarding School show is by Jane Ash Poitras, a Cree artist born in 1951 in Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, Canada.  The painting, “The Family Blackboard”, has a dense surface texture.  It’s top half depicts a blackboard on which the letter “a” is written several times as a handwriting exercise.  The lower part of the picture is a collage, a Victorian-era family portrait embedded in a matrix of colorful paint, red and black fields of pigment into which there are scratched pictographic forms, squatting figures and game animals.  The picture depicts the collision between Native American cultural practices, the boarding school regime, and conventional European family traditions – it’s an impressive work, sufficiently ideological to be fashionable, but not so politically correct as to be uninteresting.  (In general, Poitras’ collage technique coupled with impressive figurative oil painting, is reminiscent of Rauschenberg or Larry Rivers or Dadaists like Kurt Schwitters, all artists that she studied when she was a graduate student at Columbia; Poitras is very well-educated – she also has a degree in microbiology from the University of Alberta.)  Fifteen or twenty years ago, my wife Julie met her at the Split Rock Writing Conference in Duluth.  Julie attended the writing seminar with her friend, Pam.  After attending her presentation, Julie and Pam went downtown for drinks with Poitras. The artist cadged cigarettes off my wife and her friend and demanded that they buy her drinks.  She was aggressive and argumentative, possibly because she was very drunk.  She suggested that everyone that she encountered was a potential sexual partner: “everyone wants to fuck the shaman,” she maintained.  Maybe, Jane Ash Poitras represents the rebellious opposite to the staid, somewhat conventional artist Angel De Cora – but both women were the victims and beneficiaries of their identity as Native American artists.  Poitras is famous and has several enormous works in the Royal Ontario Museum – one is a triptych 25 feet long and nine feet tall.  De Cora was similarly famous in her time, the most celebrated Indian artist at the turn of the 20th century, although she is now largely forgotten. De Cora attended a residential boarding school and suffered there, although the experience made her into an artist.  Poitras never attended boarding school.  After her mother died of tuberculosis when she was six years old, Poitras was raised in Edmonton by an “elderly German woman” (as per Wikipedia).  Ethnic identity is central to the work of both artists and the basis for their fame, although this is also a sort of prison – both of these artists are good enough to be admired on their own merits and not merely as a specimen Native Americans.  

2.

The Indian art store is across the plaza in front of the museum.  The plaza is enclosed by shops and administrative offices with an old Spanish fountain at its center surrounded by iron filigree café tables.  On one side of courtyard, you can buy coffee and pastries and books about Native Americans.  Several slippery-looking palo verde trees with reptilian green bark stand in bucket-shaped depressions in the paving stones. The art gallery is opposite, near the street so that an entrance can remain open when the museum is closed. The place is brightly lit with glowing display cases and glass counters showing silver and turquoise jewelry.  It’s hushed and smells like credit cards, a faint perfumed aura around the crisp no-scent-at-all of plastic.  Middle-aged matrons attend on customers; they are dressed like well-groomed and prosperous real estate agents.  

For the most part, prices aren’t displayed.  This is the sort of establishment where, if you have to ask the price, you shouldn’t be shopping here.  It’s scarier to me than the ragged canyons with their shocking depths and funnel-shaped pits full of loose gravel.  If you slip and fall here, among the glass boxes and the mirrors in which to model your jewelry purchases, there’s nothing to keep you from skidding into the abyss, no sapling, no tangle of roots to grip to remain upright.  

I study the wares.  Everything is very expensive with a special surcharge for White guilt based on colonialist oppression and breach of treaty factored into the prices.  A small seed pot is elegantly painted, the lower register decorated with zigzag and step patterns.  A little hunch-backed kokopelli flute player bends forward, leaning in the direction of the music he is making.  (Some surmise that the kokopelli figure, ubiquitous in the Great Basin, represents cicada insects singing unseen in the leafy ash trees and cottonwoods along waterways.) I also buy a Zuni fetish, a smooth polished block of crystal cut to resemble a bear with tiny ruby-red eyes.  These are small items, charismatic, made by artists who are, no doubt, convinced that “everyone wants to fuck the shaman.”  

The sales lady carefully embeds my purchases in a cotton and swaddles the gift boxes in bubble wrap.  I escape with my loot like a robber, casting furtive glances back at the curio shop.

Outside, some front-end loaders are laboring to move parts of metal booths remaining from the powwow and intertribal craft show sponsored by the museum over the preceding weekend.  The loaders growl like bears.  It’s overcast, cool for Phoenix at this time of year but feels like mid-May in Minnesota, air fragrant with flower blossoms but sneezy also with pollen, soft breezes bearing bouquets of birdsong.

3.

The Zuni are traditionally reticent with respect to their religious practices and mythology.  Fetishes have been made for the tourist market since the late 1890's but the ritual use and meaning of these small sculptures, examples of arte mobiliar that fit in the palm of your hand, remains obscure.

The chief informant on this subject is Frank Hamilton Cushing, an anthropologist who published a study on Zuni fetishes in the Smithsonian ethnology proceedings in 1881.  Cushing was a colorful figure, probably the first anthropologist to engage in what is called “participant observation.”  (Bronislaw Malinowski is generally credited with pioneering this type of anthropology, that is, joining the tribe to the extent possible and engaging in their religious and other rituals – but Malinowski’s work with the Trobiand islanders was thirty years after Cushing lived with the Zuni.)  Cushing traveled to Las Vegas, New Mexico and, then, lived at the Zuni pueblo in that place for five years.  During that time, he was adopted into the tribe, assigned parents, and inducted into a warrior society, the Priesthood of the Bow.  There are photographs of Cushing wearing traditional Zuni clothing – he is a rail-thin dashing young man who looks remarkably like Robert Louis Stevenson.  Zunis wore garments like Mexican vaqueros – in effect, Cushing is dressed as a gay caballero, with fringed buckskin shirt, a bandana on his brow, and trousers studded with silver or brass ornaments.  (Cushing looked so good in the costume that the great artist, Thomas Eakins, painted him in this garb.)

Cushing’s presence was problematic among the Zuni.  Some of the traditionalists plotted to murder him. Many thought he was snooping into the tribe’s business and customs in an unseemly way.  However, later, when the territorial governor of New Mexico tried to seize Zuni lands, Cushing publicly opposed the land grab, creating publicity that blocked the proposed transactions.  This led to government pressure on the Smithsonian to recall Cushing from New Mexico.

The Smithsonian reassigned Cushing to studies of the Hopi tribe.  Again, Cushing insinuated himself into the clans at Oraibi (the oldest continuously occupied place in the United States).  This led to a schism between Hopi traditionalists and those willing to cooperate with Cushing.  Strife at Oraibi led to Cushing being recalled from that study as well.  At 42, Cushing choked to death on a fish-bone, much to the satisfaction of both the Hopi and Zuni traditionalists.  The sudden and untimely death of the anthropologist caused Cushing’s native enemies to claim that his demise was punishment inflicted upon him by supernaturals outraged by his disclosures of their secrets.

Julie’s Zuni fetish, a spirit bear carries on his shoulder a small turquoise medicine bundle.  The bundle seems to be strapped the creature’s spine.  According to Cushing’s informants, the bear is the “Prey God” of the western realm.  (The Zuni imagine space as being divided into six realms, the four cardinal directions as well as “above” and “below.”) At the heart of the western kingdom there is a blue mountain and, on that peak, the bear reigns.

4.

I’m in town as a member of the Board of Directors for a captive insurance company.  The proceedings involve a three-hour meeting and meals with the other Directors;

We feast at the Capitol Grill.  It’s a huge dimly lit restaurant dimly lit.  Above the heads of the diners, bent over their food in the greenish underwater gloom, yellow lights illumine a painting.  Rubicund, with sandy blonde hair and wearing black horn-rimmed spectacles, Barry Goldwater, the great friend of the kachinas, hangs over the tables where people are eating.