Knott’s Opens Doors to Indian Culture, Traditions : Theme parks: Area will feature craftsmen and performers. One aim is to help dispel stereotypes.

Earlier this month, Robert Tree Cody, an American Indian musician who will be performing at Knott’s Berry Farm this summer, visited an elementary school in North Hollywood. There, third- and fourth-graders greeted him by saying “how,” then asked where his tomahawk was.

Cody replied that contrary to the way his people have been portrayed in the movies, they do not carry tomahawks and that the word “how” derives from a Sioux salutation; the kids could just tell him “hello.”

Dispelling such stereotypes is, in part, what Knott’s Berry Farm hopes to do on a grander scale with the opening Saturday of Indian Trails, a two-acre area that presents the culture and traditions of Indians from parts of the United States and Canada.

Cody, a singer and flutist from the Maricopa-Dakota tribe, is one of numerous performers, artists and craftsmen who will be working at Indian Trails, which is adjacent to the Western-themed Ghost Town.

The $2.5-million addition features the dwellings, arts and crafts, foods and performers of tribes from three regions: the Northwest coast, the Great Plains and the Southwest. Knott’s visitors will be able to ask questions of the artisans and entertainers, and children can participate in the making of traditional feathered items, leather goods and beadwork.

The idea for this new area, conceived by Knott’s President Terry Van Gorder, reflects the aim of the nation’s oldest theme park to be more educationally and culturally oriented than other parks, said Beverly Manning Mills, Knott’s manager of culture and education and coordinator of Indian Trails.

“We’re known for being real, (for) bringing an authentic representation of history,” she said recently. “Terry Van Gorder had always felt that to really bring our Western theme full circle, we (needed) the essential element of the native people, which we were missing. We just felt this was the proper time to do it.”

Establishing such a themed land in Southern California is particularly appropriate because of the region’s large American Indian populace, said Paul Apodaca, curator of Native American Art at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana and a consultant to Indian Trails. Los Angeles is the country’s largest American Indian urban center, numbering more than 50,000 residents; Orange County’s tally of more than 20,000 is greater than those of 25 individual states.

Apodaca, an Orange resident of Navajo-Mexican descent, was brought on board in January, when work on Indian Trails began in earnest, to help locate appropriate resources and ensure authenticity.

“I’m just a bystander in a lot of ways, though,” he said. “The plans have been good all the way through. I’m knocked out by (park officials’) sincerity.”

For her part, Mills did extensive research locally and observed powwows throughout the Southwest to search for artisans and entertainers, among them singers, dancers and storytellers. She also supervised an outreach program to hire local Indians not only for Indian Trails, but also throughout the park.

Robin Hall, Knott’s vice president of design and architecture, designed the land, whose landscaping includes more than 100 varieties of trees, cactus and shrubs indigenous to each geographical region represented.

The results of the entire Knott’s team efforts were impressive during a tour of the site last week while it was still under construction. At the entrance stands a 27-foot-high totem pole of incense cedar, created by two park woodcarvers over a two-year period and including such Western images as a buffalo, a gold miner and a covered wagon.

The Southwestern area features reproductions of two Navajo hogans, one of mud and logs and the other of stone and rock, their doorways facing east in the direction of the rising sun. There also are pueblo buildings of adobe bricks.

In the Great Plains area, five canvas tipis , painted with such figures as horses and their riders, represent the dwellings of the Arapaho, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Kiowa and Nez Perce tribes.

On view in the section devoted to Pacific Northwest tribes is a red cedar “big house” of the Kwakiutl tribe designed to shelter several families. The width of each plank correlates to the prominence of the family that shaped it.

The colorful front of the big house was painted by Kwakiutl artist Richard Hunt, who also will carve house posts and a wooden dance screen during the summer. Nearby are two 17-foot potlatch, or legend, poles by Alaskan Tsimshian carver David Boxley, and a traditional Coast Salish family long-house built with hand-split logs.

Overlooking the park’s Reflection Lake is a 25-foot red cedar log that will be hollowed over the summer as it would have been for use as an ocean-going canoe by the northwest coast’s Salish tribe. The project will be done by Jackie Timothy, a British Columbia native of that tribe.

In Knott’s backstage area, Timothy takes a break from his other project, a yellow cedar totem pole that includes an eagle, a killer whale--his family emblem--a human, a beaver and various facial figures symbolizing the spirit of life. He clearly is a man on a mission.

“I feel this is an opportunity to share my culture, the Salish culture--our way of life, the respect for nature, the respect of our elders,” said Timothy, who was invited to work at Knott’s on the strength of a portfolio he left during a vacation visit to the park. “The youth today don’t have that any more.”

Native culture is also incorporated in Knott’s Western-themed summer ice show, “Back to the Wild West,” which also opens Saturday and runs three times daily in the Good Time Theatre except Tuesdays.

The cast of figure skaters will be joined by American Indian hoop dancers, as well as by world champion trick roper Gene McLaughlin, the latter on skates.

Mills said that the opening of Indian Trails is only the beginning of Knott’s Berry Farm’s quest to impart the rich American Indian spirit and heritage. She hopes to present an ever-changing array of entertainers and artists and perhaps stage a national powwow later this year.

Meanwhile, the park’s present endeavors have received a hearty stamp of approval from consultant Apodaca.

“What has impressed me is the quality, the thoughtful effort I haven’t seen anywhere else,” he said. “Instead of playing to the stereotype, they’re playing to the truth.”

* Indian Trails opens Saturday at Knott’s Berry Farm, 8039 Beach Blvd., Buena Park. Park admission: $9.95 to $22.95. Information: (714) 827-1776.

* MORE AUTHENTICITY: “Westward Ho!” opens in Anaheim. F2