Looking Beyond the Weird to Museum’s Essence

Curator Edra Moore warns visitors to the Antelope Valley Indian Museum to expect the weird.

“It’s really a funky place, but it’s got some important collections,” says Moore, busy readying the museum for its season opening this weekend.

Located near Lancaster, in a patch of the Mojave Desert that could be on the moon--if the moon had the occasional irrigated field--the museum is closed during the summer. That’s when the rattlesnakes tend to appear and the heat threatens human existence. Part of the California state park system, the museum is open to the public weekends through mid-June and by appointment to school groups and others during the week.

Filled with Native American artifacts, the museum building is a folk-art treasure in its own right. Covered with Indian motifs of varying degrees of authenticity, the structure looks like something Heidi and her grandfather might live in.

“Why a Swiss chalet out here, I have no idea,” Moore says.

Nothing about the museum is predictable. Its collections include everything from tools made by the prehistoric peoples of the West to 20th century tchotchkes made to sell to tourists. A visitor stands in front of a display case in awe of bits of clothing and other items fashioned of sea grass 2,500 years ago by the remarkably inventive people who once occupied the Channel Islands. Nearby is a diorama of questionable accuracy showing an Indian boy walking his pet turtle on a leash.

“Coming from ivory-tower academia, I had little patience with this when I first came here,” admits Moore, who had completed all but her dissertation for a doctorate in anthropology when she was hired as the museum’s sole staffer in 1989.

The museum reflects the eccentricity of the man who built the structure and, in 1928, founded the museum--Howard Arden Edwards. A self-taught artist who worked as a Hollywood set decorator, Edwards was also a performer (he had been a circus clown and professional roller skater) and a lover of all things related to Native Americans. In addition to his movie work, Edwards designed posters and did Indian-themed projects for the Southwest Museum.

He acquired 160 acres in the desert at no cost by promising to homestead. As Moore explains, that meant he had to build a permanent residence on the land, plant a crop, have somebody on site at all times and live on the property for three years after he built his house.

Edwards fulfilled the letter of the law, but just barely.

“He planted the crop but he didn’t water it,” Moore points out.

Chalet Built With Movie-Set Materials

He chose to build his Swiss chalet on top of an elaborate rock formation that is now an integral part of the structure. At first, he stayed in Hollywood and dispatched his wife and teenage son to live on-site in a tent--a life, given the climate and the remoteness of the location, that must have been as much fun as being on “Survivor.”

Working weekends, he built the house using castoff movie-set materials and wood from the local Joshua trees. Very much a man of his illusion-making profession, he didn’t make much of a distinction between what was and what appeared to be. For example, he told visitors that a pool and waterfall inside the building were fed by a local spring. In fact, he had a water barrel out back and used a generator to circulate the water.

Edwards acquired his Indian artifacts unfettered by present-day laws that forbid the sacking of burial sites and public display of items sacred to living Native Americans. He also took a storyteller’s approach to displaying the material. Thus, one case is devoted to the effects of a made-up character he called the Dawn Maiden (another is devoted to the supposed effects of the equally fictional Warrior Who Loved the Dawn Maiden). Edwards’ highly fanciful text for the Dawn Maiden display describes what is probably an ancient sacred pipe as her cigarette holder.

Moore cringed when she first saw what Edwards had wrought: “To have these things up there with no disclaimers of any sort would have been so offensive to me if I were Indian,” she says.

Finding a way to reconcile the genuine worth of the museum with its occasional affronts to modern sensibilities was a daunting challenge. Moore’s solution: to provide explanatory signs that urge visitors to look at the museum as an example of how museums have changed over time.

The museum was purchased in 1939 by Grace Wilcox Oliver, an artist and student of anthropology who had her own extensive collection of Indian material. She, too, had a Hollywood connection. With her then husband, whose surname was Fear, she invented the so-called Fearless dolly still used by the industry.

State Sees Museum as Worthy Folk Art

The state of California acquired the museum in 1979 and for a long time didn’t know what to do with it. Assaulted by wind and weather, it fell into disrepair, a condition that was aggravated by rats, bats and other pests that sought shelter within it.

But recently, Moore says, “The state has decided it’s a little jewel of a folk art building with an important anthropological collection.”

State funds have been allocated for much-needed upgrading, including repairing the roof and installing climate control. The Getty and other sources have provided money to catalog the collection and making the material more readily available to students and others.

Moore and the volunteers from the Antelope Valley who have sustained the museum over the years continue to struggle to bring it into the 21st century.

There are now exhibits on such riveting themes as the Valley’s past as a stop on a Native American trade route that stretched from the Southwest to the West Coast and its offshore islands. And there are modest but irresistible hands-on exhibits that allow visitors to grind corn and to make a fire using a stick and some cattail fluff as starter.

Native American Volunteers Needed

Eventually Moore hopes the museum will have an interpretive program of Smithsonian quality.

“We owe it to the Indian people to interpret these collections in the best way possible,” says Moore. “But we’re going to need help.”

She says she desperately needs volunteers, especially Native Americans who can place the museum’s material in context. Meanwhile, she is grateful to Oliver and the eccentric Edwards.

“They contributed a lot,” she says, not the least of which was saving the physical evidence of lives that might otherwise have been lost forever.

Native American artists will show and sell their work Saturday and Sunday. Chumash elder Charlie Cooke will perform an opening blessing on Saturday. Situated 20 miles east of Lancaster on E. Avenue M, the museum is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Admission is $1 for adults, free for children under 16. For more information, including directions, call (661) 946-3055.

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Spotlight appears every Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at valley.news@latimes.com.