Sweet!!! (For those of you not in the know, I did a GT project on pop art and Andy Warhol somewhere around the 7th grade. And there is (was?) a great installation of his work at the McNeil in SA. And I likes me some VU. And DB lets you know that it's pronounced "War-hole." Hunky Dory!
Sunday morning, Beck and I drove down to the Heard Museum to get our White Man's Burden on. Just kidding - we had a great visit at this excellent phx institution. They have a difficult task in portraying an obviously atrocious sequence of events that does not turn the entire experience into a guilt fest nor turn it into a Yay, Indians! fest. That's a difficult balance to strike. And they do an excellent job.
The first exhibit we entered was an area with booths for all of the tribes in Arizona. Each tribe got an equal amount of display space in the room, regardless of their respective populations. As Beck noted, the story was roughly the same for each tribe: we were here, we were forced out, we had to fight the settlers and the American government, we eventually won the rights to our land back and now we're back. And many of them further noted their current ventures that make money off of tourism, convenience, commerce and/or the ubiquitous-on-reservations gaming industry. The different approaches to addressing the injustices done accentuated the difficulty of conveying such a history fraught with antagonism: many of the booths alluded to "conflicts" or "disputes;" others references "devastation" by white settlers, and others used euphemisms such as "negotiations with the White man." I am sure a heavy amount of editing went into these 48 point font paragraphs about these tribes, but it brought home the idea of the medium being as important as the message. One sentence type stood out as being egregiously understated: many of the booths had a sentence along the lines of "This was a sad time for our people." But what they were discussing was not sad, it was devastating - families run off land and starving to death, tribes having their water sources destroyed by upriver water re-routers and losing any ability to farm or maintain their communities. European disease, etc. To anyone even remotely aware of Native American plight, this is hardly new information; the restraint with which they conveyed it and the carefully chosen words are what stood out. The room was full of historical details too numerous to recall here; I highly recommend investigating this room and noting real, oral history effects of the grandiose "Manifest Destiny" concepts that are shoved down your throat in history class.
There's a mural in that room, seemingly permanently installed and encircling the entire experience from above. It's a nice piece, but greater in message than in aesthetics - a really thorough portrayal of many of the historical moments in Native American / European interaction, from the earliest encounters up to modern day questioning of the progress (?!!) of the practices of Native American casinos. Another great piece; must be seen.
In that same room, we saw some of the impressive art done by local N.A. teenagers. It ranges from cute work done by ten year olds to some pretty spectacular work done by everyone from 10 to 17 year olds. Cool stuff, and nice to see a space devoted to youth art programs (he said in his best oh-so-liberal it hurts voice). That tied in nicely to two other exhibits - one, an exhibit called Remix: New Modernities in a Post Indian World, which dealt with the predictable-yet-intriguing problems of dealing with identity in a fragmented-but-global world, and two, the famed exhibit detailing the history of the Indian Boarding Schools in America. By all accounts - and again, the curators did a nice job of presenting positives and negatives of a situation drenched in negatives - these schools were assimilation camps, and the exhibit told numerous stories of NA children ripped from their families, forced to take an American education and, e.g., beaten for even speaking their native tongue. There were direct references toward the ideology of the administrators of these schools; they wanted to give the Indians "the standard American childhood and shared cultural upbringing," or something to that extent. Fascinating to me, of course, because of the inherent assumption that there is such a thing as a standard American childhood. Seems they were ghost-chasing to me, and destroying a coherent cultural structure in the process. Now, lest I commit the unthinkable sin of applying "current standards to past times," let me be clear that this is not a judgmental value-laden statement, merely one of "the American white people used some pretty unscientific notions of race and genealogy to justify some as-currently-conceived atrocities against these people." Is that contextually qualified enough for ya? Anyways, I won't mince words - that was some straight-up evil committed there, and yes, I appreciate that had I lived in those times, I probably would have been rubbing elbows with the evil-committers. Being thoroughly entrenched in my state of reality, though, I call "FOUL" to your hypothetical; I can only exist in my time as me. And that was terrible.
Of course, as noted in the exhibit, when the Indian schools were threatened to be shut down largely on the basis of these allegations, many NA tribes protested. Seems the "free" education and acculturation provided some inroads into the majority world that the NA groups appreciated. So who am I to speak one way or the other? Per usual. I could wax on and on about this aspect of the museum and this situation as a whole; I won't (phew!), but I'll just reiterate how important it is to maintain institutions like this one and have these thoughts at the forefront. Beck capped our visit with the poignant observation that on top of all of this is the clear problem that when we say *we* really mistreated *you,* we're misappropriating the blame by default - these are actions taken by past generations that have resulted in a bad situation for the us that is now. The problem is patently complex and clearly my conjectures are less than qualified to comment.
The last two exhibits we checked out were a collection of various NA artifacts - baskets, jewelry, dolls and the like - and a temporary exhibit featuring some great Inuit paintings / sculptures; again, very cool. I thoroughly appreciate what the Heard is doing with this museum.
On our way out of downtown, Beck and I paid a visit to a light-rail construction eatery, a barbecue joint that knocked our respective faces off. When they say "Hot Links," they aren't kidding. Beck napped when we got home, and I headed out to a game of 90+ degree Ultimate, returning home to discover that Beck was grilling pizza! And thus ended another nice weekend in sunny Azz.
More league Ulti tonight. We're missing a couple of peeps, and that could hurt us. We'll see. As usual, update forthcoming. Thanks for reading.
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