Old records get new home in Phoenix

One type of tourism that doesn't get a lot of mention is research.  It's not just university historians that haunt the dusty back corners of old libraries looking for tidbits that most people don't care about.

Among the most avid, and most down-to-earth, users of archives are genealogists. And their upscale cousins, the biographers. There are many other types of users of archives as well. Lawyer, for example, who want to know how a certain state of affairs came to be. Prospectors, who are looking for the best place to seek gold. Journalists, who want a new angle on an old story. Detectives, for a variety of reasons.

Arizona has several "archives" of various types. In my town, our history museum keeps track of shelves and shelves of records and drawers and drawers of microfilm that may or may not list bits and pieces of information about the tens of thousands of men who worked in the mines over the century they were operating. Hundreds of people a year come looking for parents, grandparents and a host of other relatives. That's above and beyond the more formal research: Some historians spend weeks in that one small library.

So it's easy to infer that if hundreds of people check out the archives of a small town museum, tens of thousands will be searching through the records of a state library.  And how much space does it take to host an entire state's public records? (Extend that to a nation: How many good-sized cities would love to have just the research visitors that Washington, D.C. gets each year?)

So in the summer of 2008, all the stuff that had been gathering in those famous dusty rooms in Phoenix was gathered up and moved to a new Archives Building. The $38 million Polly Rosenbaum History and Archives Building, southwest of the Capitol at 1901 W. Madison St., was to be dedicated Jan. 15.

Unlike the stereotype of an archive, this 124,000-square-foot facility controls climate, dust, light and other forces of nature and man that damage old documents. That's a considerable change from the old facilities, which were built in 1919 and 1938.

The archives, which falls under the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records, stores those things which one would expect, including state and local government records and photographs, some 125,000 of them.  (Of which about 35,000 have been digitized.)

The facility is open to the public and its website has written guides that will prepare users for what to expect.

Polly Rosenbaum, by the way, was a long-time Arizona legislator who worked hard for the preservation and display of history. She represented the Globe area, succeeding her husband, who served as House majority leader, when he died in 1949. She was in office until 1995, the longest of any state rep. She died in 2004 at age 104. She is pictured above, at right, with her old friend, former Arizona Gov. Rose Mofford.

Phoenix is the place to see Hopi katsinas

When Hopi dancers have put on the masks and garb of their katsinas, a ritual that dates to time immemorial, they are putting on far more: their identity.

"The Hopi Indians represent their gods in several ways," wrote anthropologist Jesse Walter Fewkes in 1899, "one of which is by personation --by wearing masks or garments bearing
symbols that are regarded as characteristic of those beings. The symbols depicted on these masks and garments vary considerably, but are readily recognized and identified by the Indians."

Another way of representing the gods is through the katsina "dolls," which today are considered a high art form as well as religious symbols. And while most of the ceremonies are off limits to outsiders today, many katsinas (also spelled kachinas) have been gathered at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, forming perhaps the most popular core of an extensive collection of masterpieces created by the native peoples of the Southwest.

"At each festival in which these supernatural beings are personated," Fewkes wrote, "the symbols are repainted, and continued practice has led to a high development of this kind of artistic work, many of the Indians having become expert in painting the symbols characteristic of the gods."

The advent, several decades later, of a tourism industry that craved the katsinas led to a similar growth in artistic skills. The collection at the Heard, numbering more than 500, includes many of the earlier carvings, collected by the Harvey Company, and later images gathered by the late Sen. Barry Goldwater.

Arizona's Hopis, like neighboring New Mexico's Zunis, have celebrated their religion with katsina ceremonies since long before the Europeans knew of the Americas. Yet they continue to add new members to the katsina pantheon as they learn more about their universe. Some of the activities introduced by other tribes and by the descendants of the Europeans have even come to be represented.

One of the best ways to learn about the katsinas is by experiencing the Heard Museum's extensive collection, which is part of a vast exhibit called "Native People in the Southwest," which will continue indefinitely at the Phoenix location, 2301 N. Central Ave., Phoenix.

It features nearly 2,000 treasures, the Heard says, including jewelry, cultural items, pottery, baskets, textiles, beadwork and more. And it's not just the little stuff. There's a full-sized Navajo hogan, Hopi piki room, Yaqui ramada and Pueblo oven.

For more information, visit the Heard website. Before you go, you might want to learn more about katsinas and about the Hopi.   (The art accompanying this article was drawn by a native artist contracted by Fewkes for his report for the Bureau of American Ethnology.)