High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [62]
I was glad the museum’s directors undertook this as part of their mission: to counter the prevailing notion that Indians made nice pots and shot buffalo and now are dead. I silently wished them luck.
Camille and I were immediately drawn to the wing called “Old Ways, New Ways,” a permanent interactive exhibit where kids (and adults, if they’re game) can learn to play a drum under the videotaped tutelage of a Kiowa elder, and use a computer to design a Navajo rug, and find enough other adventures to fill an afternoon, easily. I stood with a crew of teenagers at a display showing how the ancient Anasazi fashioned little willow-twig animals that archaeologists frequently find tucked into high crevices in the Grand Canyon. Earnestly we all followed instructions, wrapping and looping our twigs to make horses. Mine looked like a giraffe. I stuffed it deep down in my pocket, wondering if maybe the Anasazi stuck their failures into those out-of-the-way crevices for the same reason, and kept the good ones around for the kids to play with.
Camille had better luck fitting wooden forms together to make a Tlingit mural. I stood behind her, watching how two simple shapes—a blunt oval and a curly U-shape—repeat over and over in all the familiar totem-pole aggregations of owl and raven and whale, adding up to that instantly recognizable gestalt of the art of Inuit and other northern tribes. If I hadn’t seen it taken apart and reassembled, I would never have understood this amazing principle.
I’ve always felt half-blind in places where I couldn’t touch anything. I find I need to assess textures, and pick things up to see how they’re put together; I am far more likely than my child to get in trouble for doing so. Camille has escorted me out of many a china shop. Once, in a Japanese park, I reached out and touched a palace wall because I couldn’t identify its material by sight, and wanted to know whether it was stucco or stone; my finger set off great honking alarms and brought a police car up the gravel path. (The lovely signs in Japanese, which I’d taken for part of the decor, apparently said TOUCH THIS AND DIE, HUMBLE TOURIST!) It’s true we’re a sight-biased species, but still it seems odd that museums that aim to instruct us about a multisensory world tend to convey their information entirely through sight, and maybe a little sound. In such places I generally feel like a child, not quite worthy of the material I’m meant to admire; in the children’s wing of the Heard, oddly enough, I felt more respected.
Every part of the museum begged for our attention. The main gallery’s permanent collection of ancient and modern Native arts are displayed as a living continuum. The entry is a spare, dark auditorium; in a continuous audiovisual loop, Hopi and Tohono O’odham and Dine people talk directly to the camera about their children and grandparents, their villages, their history, their funerals and blessing ceremonies. Their verbal portraits fall against shifting images of their lives’ dramatic backgrounds: the Grand Canyon, Taos Pueblo, saguaros with their arms in the air.
The words of an unidentified Taos Pueblo man are inscribed on the wall of the gallery’s entrance: “We have lived upon this land from days beyond history’s record, far past any living memory, deep into the time of legend. The story of my people and the story of this place are one single story.”
Who else could make this claim? In North America, no one. All American