Heard Museum

Mosaic at Heard Museum

We had a second cold night in Flagstaff, low in the 30’s. Flagstaff is at 7000’ and we’re headed to Phoenix at about 2000, so the temperature rose from the low 50s to the mid-90s during our trip. Our primary tourist activity today is the Heard Museum, which specializes in Southwest Indian culture and art. We took one of the guided tours of the highlights of the museum. Our guide emphasized the modern art pieces and told stories about the artist or the pieces themselves. He seemed to assume we would know the artists. He finished with an exhibit about the Indian Boarding Schools. Here we learned how the Indian Affairs Department, beginning in about 1880, took the children off reservation, dressed them as Americans and taught them to become Christian Americans. They were torn away from their family, their culture, and their language for years. While they did learn a trade, they were neither welcomed as Americans or Indians anymore. This started changing in the 1930’s, when they were allowed to speak their language and participate in the various Indian cultural practices (since they all came from different tribes, they began to learn about the cultures of other Native Americans). On our own, we also came upon what we had expected in the museum, pottery, clothes, and art of the various Indian tribes of the area.

Indian Boarding School