Arizona State University

We headed for Tucson, a new destination for us. We stayed at the Prince of Tucson RV Park, a very clean park with a pool, and a big wall above us preventing the highway noise from reaching our trailer. Mary wasn’t feeling too well, so she stayed at the trailer while I visited two of the museums at Arizona State University. The first was the Center for Creative Photography. I was hoping to see some great landscape pictures, but there were 3 galleries of various pictures – mostly black and white of varying topics. They also had a lot of books of photos – most of them strange: faces of ranchers, rest stops of the southwest, “sleepless nights watching Law and Order”, Camping for Japanese (about the Japanese internment camps in World War II). I was disappointed.

Ceramic from 1050 AD

Then I went to the Arizona State Museum. They are known for their huge Indian Pottery exhibit, which had pottery from the 900’s till modern day. They also had a section on each of the primary Indian tribes of Arizona, and Northern Mexico. It was well done. For each tribe, they explained about the tribe, their creation story, their primary celebrations, and their history. What was surprising was how the whites have treated the Indians, not only in early times, but as late as the 1980s. For example, it wasn’t until 1992 that the Bureau of Land Management stopped planning a dam site that would have put 2/3^rd of one Indian reservation under water. 

Artifacts from Colorado River People