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By Root 427 0

on my father’s side and a blonde, blue-eyed daughter, I find it impossible to pin down the meaning of ethnicity. It’s an especially delicate business here in the Southwest, where so many of us boil in one pot without much melting. We’re never allowed to forget we are foreign bodies in the eyes of our neighbors. The annual Winter Holiday Concert at Camille’s school features a bright patchwork of languages and rituals, each of which must be learned by a different subset of kids, the others having known it since they could talk. It sounds idyllic, but then spend half an hour on the playground and you’re also likely to come away with a whole new vocabulary of racial slurs. On the playground no one’s counting the strengths of your character, nor the woman your great-grandfather married, unless her genes have dyed your hair and fixed your features. It’s the face on your passport that gets you in. Faces that set us apart, in separate houses.

When I pack up my child and head off to a place like the Heard Museum, it’s not to claim some piece of our own lost heritage. I have only an inkling of my forebears, and they represent more worlds than I could claim: Scottish stonemasons; Portuguese sailors; farmers from the Eastern Band of Cherokee; planters and sharecroppers and hapless conscripts to both sides of the Civil War. They died without passing on to me the secrets of constructing a limestone chimney flue, navigating by the stars, or planting by the moon. Half the living souls in the southeastern U.S., it seems, claim to be descended from Sacajawea, and that is their business, but I’m not so interested in bloodlines as motivation for multicultural appreciation. I appreciate because I’m interested, just as I can admire tropical fish without being part fish. (And if I am part fish, that is my business.) We go to the Heard out of love for the great elaborate world, and also to feel more at home in our own neighborhood. I want my child to be so completely familiar with differences that she’ll ignore difference per se and really see what she’s looking at. When she looks at an Acoma water jar, I don’t want her to think less of it because it was made by hand in a nonelectrified village high on a mesa. Neither do I want her to think it is the rarefied relic of saints. It seems odd to have to add the latter, but lately we’ve been besieged with a new, bizarre form of racism that sets apart all things Native American as object of either worship or commerce, depending on your proclivities. It’s scary enough to see Kokopelli on a keychain—God for sale, under five dollars—but I’m not much more comfortable with the other angle, the sweat-lodge suburbanites who borrow the material trappings of native ceremonies as a spiritual quickie to offset the stresses of corporate life. What began as anthropology has escalated to fad, and it strikes me that assigning magical power to a culture’s every belief and by-product is simply another way of setting those people apart. It’s more benign than burning crosses on lawns, for sure, but ultimately not much more humane.

An equal in our time and place is someone with an address and friends, who works and plays and buys groceries in packages with brand names, who is capable of both nobility and mistakes. People who are picture perfect, magical, untouchable, or worse yet, only historic, do not need equal opportunity or educational grants.

An Acoma water jar is just a useful thing, really. Like a soda-pop can, only beautiful.

The Heard Museum stands today because of a hobby that grew out of hand. Dwight and Maie Bartlett Heard settled in the pioneer town of Phoenix in 1895, and long before it was fashionable or provident, they found an absorbing interest in the culture of Arizona’s Native peoples. By the 1920s, their collection of artifacts had grown too large and valuable as a community resource to keep on the parlor shelves. Steadily and gently, over more than half a century, the Heard has grown to be one of the world’s great centers of Native American heritage.

The entry courtyard welcomed us with the