Arizona sounds like a warm place to spend a couple of days, right? So our reasoning went when we booked our two night layover en route home to California. The logic may have failed us, with Phoenix coming in at just slightly colder than my family's suburban Pennsylvania, but the city was still a cool place (oh, the puns!) to spend a day or so. Phoenix isn't terribly pedestrian-friendly, so we didn't hit up too many attractions, but we did squeeze in visits to the Heard Museum and the Desert Botanical Garden.
The Heard Museum describes itself as the world's preeminent museum of Native American art, and it does a pretty good job. I walked in bracing myself and found it far less depressing than what I'd anticipated. The museum does a very good job of celebrating and educating on the culture of various tribes, especially those of the Southwest, without too much focus on the loss and the tragedy these peoples have experienced. A few interesting facts I learned:
- The Hopi village of Orayvi (Oraibi, Arizona) was founded in 1150 AD and, at least according to the Heard Museum, is the oldest continuously inhabited community in the US.
- The Navajo Nation has the largest federally recognized reservation, spanning an area across Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah that is about the size of West Virginia. Personally I had no idea that reservations could get this big. Kind of makes you wonder whether they should be getting their own congressional representation...
- Native Americans have served in pretty much every American war, ever since the Revolution, but they were not legally US citizens until 1924.
- The US Federal Bureau of Indian Education still exists! In 2019!
- Four federally-operated off-reservation boarding schools are still in operation, including one right in my home state of California. Apparently the boarding schools, in the midst of all you probably heard regarding cultural genocide, didn't only do awful things. (They did a lot of awful things.) They played a large role in creating a sort of broader Indian American cultural identity that extended beyond tribal affiliation. And reforms to start embracing, rather than purely erasing, native culture within the boarding schools began as early as the 1930s. (Who knew people were becoming "woke" so early?)
- Ever wonder about Native American education after high school? The Bureau of Indian Education oversees two Native American colleges (a university and a polytechnic institute). And there are forty tribally-run community colleges.
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| Images from the Hear Museum. Note in the bottom right that even the American Indians are not immune to the magic of a certain British wizard. |
The Desert Botanical Garden's Las Noches de las Luminarias that evening was much less about learning and more about looking at (and listening to!) pretty things. Every night in December, the Desert Botanical Garden lights up with luminaria bags and string lights, and musical groups nestled throughout the park create the soundtrack to the sparkling evening. We were lucky to have booked in advance, as the nearly freezing temperatures weren't enough to keep the event from selling out by the time we'd arrived! While night fell too quickly for us to see all of the plants, we did enjoy the added bonus of listening to several local and native musicians. There is an undeniable magic to huddling under a heat lamp and listening to a guitar and panpipes performed across a backdrop of cactus silhouettes against an inky blue sky.
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| Las Noches de las Luminarias at the Desert Botanical Gardens |
And, while far less compelling to anyone who didn't enjoy the stay first-hand, no summary of our trip to Arizona would be complete without singing the praises of the darling home in which we stayed, where we got a private upstairs unit all to ourselves. It came complete with a cozy window-front corner for breakfasts and evening drinks, several chairs for lounging, a stocked bookshelf, and most importantly, the ultimate dream bathroom that I am already fantasizing about replicating one day if I ever have enough money to own a home of my own. *Swoon.*
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| Our charming Phoenix home away from home. |
And with that, it's a wrap on 2019!
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| ¡Hasta luego, Arizona! |
