as the Grand Canyon, must be rated as being among the greatest tourist attractions in the world. For sheer immensity and grandeur the Grand Canyon is difficult to surpass. There are many Indian tribes in the region and many of them have had colourful histories, but while they have all had their great moments all have also had some sad experiences as minority groups. Best known to Maori readers because of the Cowboy cult are the Apaches, the movie villains who are supposed to delight in shooting burning arrows into covered wagons. More important numerically, however, are the Pueblo Indians, the Navaho and the Hopi. The archaeological remains in the area reveal that Indians have been in the Southwest for many hundreds of years, at least 2,000 years ago, and they were agriculturists, who specialized in the growing of corn and squash.1 U.S. Dept of the Interior Handbook, Meso Verde National Park, 1966. The obvious signs of antiquity both of the land and of the people are a special feature of the Southwest. Many of the region's archaeological sites are also great tourist attractions. It was in the summer of 1966, during the months of June, July and August that we were able to visit this historic region of the United States. Our visit was made possible by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, some funds from the University of Southern Illinois, plus a little of our own savings. We shall show in the following paragraphs that we took advantage of the opportunity and saw as much as we could. The unique part of the whole experience, for us, at least, is that we went everywhere as a family unit; thus, four Maoris benefited from the generosity of the Americans and not merely one individual. The following description is limited mainly to the living Indians and especially to some of their present-day ceremonial activity which we had the pleasure of seeing. When we woke up on the morning of June 24, 1966 we were just east of Amarillo, in Texas, and had slept in our station wagon on the roadside with lots of other travellers. Sunrises and sunsets in Texas are beautiful. The horizon is far-sweeping, the land undulating and the grass comparatively green. On this day we entered the Southwest from Texas. The change in scenery from Texas into New Mexico is sudden and dramatic. There is no green grass over the border. Instead there are hundreds of acres of burnt red land covered with stunted and sparse vegetation. There are strange and weird mountain shapes, table tops, jagged rocky formations and the sky above is a clear duck-egg blue. From out of this unencumbered sky the sun beats down savagely. The station wagon becomes a moving stove with all the elements turned on, and we know that we are in desert country following a black shimmering ribbon of road which is completely flanked by hot, dry, red earth. We were heading for the city of Santa Fe. The city was very different from any we had seen in other parts of the United States. Adobe style architecture was everywhere in evidence. For some strange reason the town itself seemed to blend with the environment, its periphery melting gracefully into the landscape. We arrived there at 4 p.m. and Santa Fe became our headquarters in the Southwest. I worked for the university at Santa Fe but when not working my family and I explored the city and the Indian reservations around it. Santa Fe is a remarkable city. It is a city of artists, writers, amateur historians, anthropologists, silversmiths, and traders. It has three museums, a beautiful ‘open-air’ opera house, and innumerable gift shops selling Indian jewellery and odd curios. It is also a city of Indians who come to it from the surrounding reservations of Taos, Picuris, San Juan, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Tesuque, Cochiti, Santa Domingo, San Felipe and Zia. The city maintains positive relationships with the Indians through the Southwestern Association on Indian Affairs, the United Indian Traders Association and through its institutions of learning. Of particular interest to Maori readers is the fact that in Santa Fe is located the Institute of American Indian Arts, the American counterpart of our New Zealand Institute of Arts and Crafts which is housed at Rotorua. We visited the Institute where Indian students from all parts of the United States, including Alaska, are trained in the arts. It is a vital institution with imaginative goals, which makes a reality of the dream of education through the arts. Such, then, is
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