Journey to Grand Canyon (Part I)

For most of my adult life, I have dreamed of visiting the Grand Canyon, “the huge hole in ground” as my husband called it. Life got in the way, and we discovered other amazing places in America and abroad which we visited. Timing was perfect now and we flew for four and a half hours to the scorching lands of Phoenix, Arizona.

People kept telling us that the 100-plus Fahrenheit temperatures were just a dry heat and thus it posed little threat as long as we drank gallons of water per day. Upon hearing such comments, my thoughts went immediately to, my oven has dry heat, and I would not want to stick any part of me inside.

Sure enough, everybody we met was carrying bottles of water, some smaller, some larger, but plenty of water in case they were overcome by heat. So far this year, Phoenix had two homeless citizens who died of heat stroke.

On the first day, on my way to the Heard Museum downtown, I took the purple-colored light rail they called the metro.  The station was one block from our hotel and right across the green cross marijuana dispensary.

A gaggle of homeless people were congregating in the station, cheering one guy who walked out of the dispensary with a bag and a joint in hand which he promptly offered to share with me or anybody nearby. I declined and moved closer to the end of the platform. Two metro employees were standing close to me and seemed oblivious to and unconcerned about the drug use in front of them.

When the metro arrived, the interior was quite cool and pleasant and most of the car was occupied by homeless people riding to escape the suffocating 103-plus Fahrenheit heat. Some were obviously mentally ill. A kind man offered me his seat but I declined since I was getting off at the next stop. The car was otherwise clean and so were the streets.

I was told by the friendly Sudanese taxi driver, who took me from the airport to the hotel, that 10,000 visitors had descended for the week on downtown Phoenix for various conferences and he was doing a lot of taxi business. I regretted getting into his taxi as it reeked like someone had died inside. I made a mental note to avoid taxis from then on.

Once we discovered Waymo, it was a no-brainer, we did not use Uber or Lyft as the Waymo prices were lower and the Jaguar driverless SUVs were amazing and certainly drove safer than my husband and I combined. I am not sure how much radiation we were exposed to each time from all the devices, radar, lidar, GPS, Internet connection, Wi-Fi, etc. that made Waymo's SUVs driverless.

I walked slowly from the station to the museum in the stifling heat and I felt like my legs were made of lead. When I left Virginia, the temperature in the morning was in the upper 60s Fahrenheit. Now it was 103 F. I stopped often to rest and drink water, no shade anywhere to seek refuge from the beating sun, and finally reached my destination for the morning. I heard some birds chirping and I could not figure out where they were hiding from the infernal heat.

The Heard Museum was a lovely complex of southwest style buildings with cacti gardens and fountains in various inner courtyards. Statues and amazing varieties of cacti surrounded the inner courtyards where the sunshine scorched the flowers so intensely that they required umbrellas just like humans did.

The welcome sign described the 12 galleries named after various non-tribal sponsors, the world class café, and the outdoor sculpture gardens, a place for “advancing American Indian art.”

The museum did not allow bottles of water inside, so I had to check mine in. I was not sure what type of museum this was, but I soon discovered that it was more than about art, it was a Native American Heritage Museum staffed entirely by Native Americans, including the museum board.

The guide told us that the original Heard Museum had been anthropologically themed with artifacts from around the world which the Heard family had collected, including the majestic palm trees surrounding the property which had been brought from Egypt by Mr. Heard.

The museum housed beautiful black pottery by Maria Martinez (1887-1980), an artist from San Ildefonso Pueblo in New Mexico, and her family whom she taught the unusual craft of black pottery making.  Other San Ildefonso pueblo pottery displayed was polychrome but done with so much attention to its design, detail, and color that it was seldom rivaled.

More galleries included the Sandra Day O’Connor Gallery with a collection of dolls with beaded native American costumes, photographs of tribal cars, blown glass artifacts attached to thick sticks, and other artwork from Arizona’s 22 tribes, rugs and stories of the Navajo code-talkers during WWII, and photographs of Native Americans who died in recent wars.

Navajo code-talkers blanket

A heartbreaking section dealt with photographic and descriptive history of the Indian Schools which took children away from their homes and tribes. The government sent them far away to Indian Schools like the one in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where they were forced to be white, to forget their roots, their language and culture, in order that the government could confiscate their ancestral lands.

The children fought back through their arts and crafts, drawings, games, and other methods. They were able to organize and keep their culture alive despite being prisoners in these schools, to a degree that the white government men did not expect. Some children did forget their own languages if they were taken too young.

Another exhibit included amazing basketry donated to the museum by a local Indian grocery store. Such artifacts are priceless and rarer to find as intricate basket weaving is becoming a dying art, the guide said.

One of the visitors asked the guide what the correct term was to call tribal peoples, i.e., Native Americans, Indians, indigenous peoples, etc. and the guide did not have a satisfactory and definitive answer – whatever the government decides.

I asked the guide if any of the displays remain from the time when the Heards were alive and she said no, all those artifacts had been moved to the basement and stored after Mr. and Mrs. Heard had died and the museum board became entirely Native American. I inquired why they had not changed the name of the museum from Heard to the Native American Heritage Museum, which is its true content today, but she did not have a good answer.

On the ground courtyard, large posters attached to the adobe walls talked about the Heard family. Dwight Heard had moved from Chicago to Phoenix in 1895 after he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and was advised by his doctors to move to a drier climate. 

According to the museum's archives, "In Phoenix, Dwight Heard became one of the largest landowners in the Salt River Valley. His investment company specialized in real estate and his holdings included the Bartlett-Heard Land and Cattle Company south of Phoenix, where he raised prize cattle, alfalfa, citrus trees, and cotton. Heard was actively involved in the political and economic decisions affecting water rights and who would control and manage the rivers that delivered this scarce resource."

The Heards' estate, Casa Blanca, built in 1903, was where the Heard Museum was built in 1928. The Heards collected Indian artifacts from Indian art dealers, trading posts, and items from their trips abroad such as Hawaii and Egypt.

TO BE CONTINUED