The Heard Museum and the Boarding School Archive

Dwight and Maie Bartlett Heard built the museum in nineteen twenty-nine to house their personal collection of American Indian art. What it became over the following century is something different: the institution that decided to ask the people whose cultures it held what they wanted said about themselves.

The Heard Museum on North Central Avenue in Phoenix has spent decades building partnerships with the tribal nations of the Southwest, moving from a collection-and-display model toward something closer to co-stewardship. Its research center holds archives, photographs, and manuscripts relating to Hohokam, O'odham, Yavapai-Apache, Navajo, Hopi, Yaqui, and other southwestern cultures.

The museum's "Remembering Our Indian School Days" exhibition draws on survivor testimony from alumni of the Phoenix Indian School and comparable boarding institutions across the country. It is among the most thorough museum treatments of the boarding-school era in the United States, produced in active partnership with tribal nations whose members experienced the schools. The testimony in that exhibition does not soften what happened. It names the specific policies, the specific punishments, the specific generational ruptures.

The Heard is roughly a thirty-minute walk from the site of the Phoenix Indian School, which is now Steele Indian School Park. The museum holds the memory that the park does not. If you visit one, the other is worth the walk.