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The Antelope Valley Indian Museum is located in northwestern LA County. It is 17 Miles east of the Antelope Valley Freeway (State Highway 14), on Ave. M between 150th and 170th Street east. Go east on Ave. K or Palmdale Boulevard and follow the signs to the museum. Or exit Pearblossom Highway (138) at 165th street east and travel north. |
Interview with Edra Moore Curator for the Indian Museum in the High Mojave desert
Is the Indian Museum a private foundation?
Moore: It was privately owned by the man who built it. Then he sold it to another private owner, and when she got to the age where she wasn`t able to run it by herself anymore, she wanted to sell it to the State of California. The Department of Parks and Recreation. They didn`t want it at all. They thought, that it was too much upkeep. They thought that it was pretty funky. But she was politically very well connected, and so we ended up with the governor signing up an edict, that the state had to buy it. The same people that had fought to keep the museum, and have the state buy it, became the corps volunteer group. We have a wonderful volunteer group. They wrote an interpretive program and kept it going. For the first ten years they did almost everything. I`m the first museum employee that they hired for here. And I`ve been here since 1989. I was working on my doctorate in anthropology/archeology at University of California Davis. But my husband is ill, and I needed a job about the time when this job came up. For that I happened to be in the Mojave desert.
Are there a lot of visitors?
Moore: There are more all the time. 1989 was the first year that we opened every weekend instead of once a month. Even with publicity it took them a while to notice us. So we average anywhere from 80 or 90 on a slow day up to as many as 250 to 300 people a day on the weekends now. During the week we have tours for the schoolgroups, and we provide those free to schools. We`re not open in the summer because it`s too hot. We work here, but because it`s a historic building, and we can`t make the airconditioning right for the visitors. We open the last of september, and we have a big celebration. We have Indian traditional dancing, and we have Indian artists who come and demonstrate the kind of work they do. Then we have Indian food and so it`s a big affair. We had about 3000 people here.
Can you tell us something about the history of the house, the founder and the idea?
Moore:
The man was named Howard Arden Edwards. When he was in 5th grade he
quit elementary school and joined a circus, and became a circus clown.
He was a selftaught artist and he actually became fairly wellknown
during the 30s and 40s for his landscapes. He later went to work to
the South West Museum when he sold this place. And he had a tremendous
interest in Indian cultures. But as an artist he was teaching night
classes. Adult education classes at Lincoln High School. So, he heard
that land out here was being opened up for some home steading. Because
they wanted to develop it as an agricultural area. That are a large
number of springs that were in this area. Very high watertable. And
we`re right in betwen the two earthquake faults, which form the valley.
And on the riff zones, there are springs all along here. Prehistorically
this was a major trade corridor. Partially because it`s a natural
sort of a pass, through from LA to the Southwest. Partly because there
was plenty of water in an otherwise very arid place this was opened
up in 1928 for home steading. And he bought a 160 acres. The reason
he knew about it was, that his wife had grown up in Lancaster. But
she didn`t want to come out here. And they had a 14 year old son who
didn`t want that either. He was happy in the LA area. But so, the
terms of the home stead were that: To plant a crop, you had to dig
a well, you had to build a permanent residence, and you had to have
someone on the property all the time, and you had to live in the property
for three years. So the way he has managed that with his working in
LA was: He built the fireplace in the main hall in there... No, first
he poured the concrete floor. At that time there was a man helping
him to make it in sections to look like rock. He wanted it to be very
natural, because he had started collecting Indian artefacts, and this
was a period in the 20s and 30s, when it wasn`t against the law to
just go out and look for them. He did a lot of that. But he also bought
artefacts, that other people dug up. A lot of that was going on in
the 20s and 30s because people began to take an interest in Indian
cultures. He thought that this would make a wonderful place to show
off his collections. And he wanted it to be kind of a little research
museum. He wanted it to be something that people could learn from.
He used to go visit Indian tribes and live with them during the summer.
In which areas?
Moore: His biggest collection is the coastal collection from the Santa Barbara and Los Angeles coast. But also the channel islands. A lot of materials. In fact we have some very rare materials, that are like one of a kind items. What he did then was, put up a tent betwen the two boulders on each side of the fireplace. And the winter of 1928 he had his wife and son lived in that tent. While he worked down in LA during the week, and come up on weekends and bring some of his artstudents. They just literally started building the walls from the fireplace on around. It took him about five years. He finished in 1932. He used to make sets for Hollywood. He did some of the backdrops for the natural history displays of the Southwest Museum at one time. And so he could acquire the set board. That`s what the walls were all made of. He put one on the inside and painted it, and on the outside it`s stuccoed. When Mrs. Oliver bought the property from him, she had to replace some of the walls. It was barely convenient for the rodents to eat holes through and come in, and all of that. He built this over a rock formation, because he thought, that the natural effect would be wonderful. He had a waterfall coming down that rockwall. He told everyone that it was directly from a spring on the butte. But it wasn`t. It was from a little circulating pump, that he had hidden in a barrel of water. And then he would write plays about the Indians. The texts of the plays are just... oh god, awful. A hunter coming into the camp, and having the people in the camp say: "Thou hast been hunting?" (laughing). And if you noticed upstairs, he glued artefacts on these cardboard things, that he called visual learning aide. And then he misspelled a lot of words. He made up his own stories. He had a lot of knowledge about some of the things, and he tried to inform himself. But a lot of them are made up. He had a big imagination. I don`t know if you noticed the ones that say: "The Don maid lived on Saint Nicholas Island. These are her belongings." Then there is a mighty warrior who loved the Don maid, who wore that big necklace when he went "awooing". By anthropologist standards I was really offended by this. Because I thought; when I was an American Indian, I would be so offended by this. On the plank with the Don maiden for instance, there is one item... It`s a little... it`s made of sea weed. It comes from the coast, and it`s a little to be. It was probably a sucking tube from that tschaman used for healing. He labeled it: "This was a cigarette holder". And so there are a couple of items on that same board, that we have no idea what they were. But they`re also made of sea weed and little carved items. He said, that she must have been fastidious, because these were her nailcleaners. And he has a sign in there that says: "And this was her rouge pad." It`s actually an artefact from the Hopi culture in Arizona. Then he would put these characters: Como the pendant maker. Kiko the maker of bees. Then he would create these characters for his plays. And there is a natural amphitheatre up here in the rocks, where he could build elaborate sets of Indian villages, and elaborate costumes for the people. And have local and Los Angeles people act in these plays. And put on these plays, that he wrote. They said, that as many as two to threethousand people would come for these events from LA. That was in the early and middle 30s. So that`s the history of the place. But by 1938, they had fulfilled the requirements of the homestead, and Mrs. Edwards and her son were very tired of living out here. So they moved back to the LA area. A woman named Grace Oliver just was hiking in the desert, and she stumbled over the place, thought that it was absolutely charming. She had quite a bit of money. She had invented a trolly for the film industry, that carries the big cameras. They still use it today. So she thought, that this would be a wonderful little hideaway, to get away from things. But she also had a sizeable collection of Indian materials. She was an anthropology student for a time. So she arranged to buy the place. Then, in 1940 she decided to turn it into a public museum. He let her have all of his collections when he sold the place to her. And she had her own collections of Indian items. Plus, she had an African-, a Latin American- and an Alaskan collection. So she ran the museum for several years. In 1948 she became ill. She sold it to a couple, that turned it into a dude ranch. They put all the artefacts in the upstairs room and nailed the door shut.
What is a dude ranch?
Moore: A dude ranch is where people can go and pretend to be cowboys. But they went broke. So Mrs. Oliver bought it back. Mr. Edwards had retired from the Southwest Museum. He had cancer. And she invited him to come and live in one of the cottages, and help her restore it again to a museum. And so he came back and helped her. And so it looks a lot today like it did. Then he died, while he was still living here. She ran it intermittently up till 1976 when she also died. It presents a tremendous challenge if you`re going to be a museums person, a curator, an anthropologist here, because it`s actually two entities in one. It`s a folk art structure. It`s a kind of Americana type of thing. But then the collections are very fine collections, are very serious collections. In the 30s everybody was doing his own collecting,having their own little museums. The Indian people who lived in this area were extremely innovative. In fact they evidently did so well in this particular valley, that they were like wealthy middlemen in the trade industry. We had enormous villages here. There was a village of about probably many hundreds of people, that lived there permanently. And we have dates back to about 3200 B.C..We noticed, that there were people here probably 10 000 years ago. You have to remember that the people who settled, who came to this country were Europeans. And they came and were really very rootless, and destroyed the Indian culture. I find our history just absolutely apalling in this area. I grew up in western Colorado. The historic tribes that were there were the Utes. I remember as a little girl, this was a very backward, rural area and the people are extremely prejudiced. They treated the Indian people as if they weren`t even human. We are so culturally ignorant and very arrogant about American roots. And growing up in a rural community, I found the peasant population is actually worse. My family is still up, exactly where we lived in western Colorado. I`m the only one who left, and when I go back, it`s just stepping back in time a hundred years. A few things have changed, but very little. And it`s very slow.