‘Bizarre’ Museum Being Modernized

It can be argued that Edra Moore has the worst museum job in America.

At 71, she is director and the lone professional staffer of the Antelope Valley Indian Museum, 20 miles east of Lancaster, on the scorched edge of the Mojave Desert.

Run by the California Department of Parks and Recreation, the museum is home to an eclectic collection of priceless Native American artifacts amassed early in the 20th century, when few laws and fewer inhibitions limited what non-Indian collectors could take.

The precious jumble is housed in a 73-year-old building that can best be described as the unlikely marriage of Swiss chalet and Hollywood Native American. (Think Heidi meets Sal Mineo in “Tonka.”)

“Bizarre hardly begins to describe it,” Moore said of the museum she has headed since 1989.

The collection of 7,000 pieces includes rare, 2,500-year-old objects made of sea grass by tribes that once lived on the Channel Islands. It also bears the unique, and problematic, stamp of Howard Arden Edwards, who created the museum in 1928.

A onetime circus clown and professional roller-skater, Edwards was a Hollywood set decorator who built his museum out of discarded materials from movie sets and wood from local Joshua trees, the only vegetation of any size that survives in this part of the Mojave. Now on the National Register of Historic Places, the eccentric building is a firefighter’s nightmare.

The displays that remain from the Edwards era reflect his genuine interest in Native American culture and his showman’s notion of what would please a crowd. “He always put a romantic spin on things,” said Moore, who did graduate work in anthropology at UC Davis. A gifted and self-taught painter, Edwards died in 1953 at the age of 69.

Clearly, authenticity was not Edwards’ long suit. His interpretation of the collection ran more to MGM than to the views of mainstream anthropologists or Native Americans. As a result, the museum includes a painting by Edwards of an American Indian boy walking his pet turtle on a leash, a practice of no known tribe.

Other Hollywood touches include display cases of objects from a mix of tribes that Edwards described as the effects of an imaginary Dawn Maiden (whose so-called “cigarette holder” is probably a sacred pipe) and her beau, the Warrior Who Loved the Dawn Maiden.

Seeing a problem, Moore came up with an inexpensive way to solve it--the only kind she could afford with an operating budget of $20,000. She put up signs explaining that the museum is a good place to study how museums have evolved over the last 70 years.

“You can only improve if you build on the reality that exists,” she said of the decision to include Edwards in the updated museum story that she and her advisors are developing.

The museum has presented Moore with one challenge after another: missing records from the Depression era, when Grace Wilcox Oliver owned it; a fragile building with no climate control--not even air-conditioning; the occasional Mojave green rattlesnake, and attendance that would depress a saint.

Because of the punishing climate--summer temperatures often reach three digits--the museum is open to the public from October through mid-June, weekends only. On a good weekend, 100 people show up. The Autry Museum of Western Heritage gets 1,000 visitors on a typical Saturday and Sunday and the Getty Center more than 10,000.

Moore could be forgiven if she decided to turn her back on the museum and spend more time with her grandchildren. Instead, with the help of advisors, including local Native Americans and professionals from other museums, she is determined to stay with the Antelope Valley museum until it is a modern institution.

Among the key steps being taken: putting the collection online, where it can be seen by people who would never visit in person. Financed with $146,000 from the Getty Grant Program, the electronic catalog will be available as soon as compatibility and other technical issues are resolved, Moore said.

She is also working with advisory groups to update the interpretive program, create a library for the many schoolchildren who visit and improve the volunteer and docent programs. There are even plans for an ethnobotanical garden that would feature local plants and explain their traditional uses.

“She’s brought the museum into the 21st century,” said Teri Brewer, a UCLA-trained folklorist and anthropologist who teaches at the University of Glamorgan near Cardiff, Wales. “She’s really a whirlwind.”

Brewer, who has been studying Edwards and other early 20th century interpreters of California and its cultures, was so taken with the museum that she volunteered to write about its founder as part of its revamped interpretive program.

In Brewer’s view, Edwards is a kindred spirit to Charles Fletcher Lummis, the Southwest Museum founder who so admired and championed the Native American cultures of the Southwest.

Marty Meeden, who teaches third grade in Palmdale, is one of the museum’s Native American advisors. He remembers going to the museum as a child when it still displayed the contents of a native grave, including a human skeleton--a practice outlawed in the early 1990s but common in the past. “I thought it was creepy,” he recalled.

Meeden, 42, who is Paiute and Washoe, said he is pleased that the museum is now reaching out to living Indians, acknowledging that the native people--who once participated in a busy trade route connecting the Southwestern tribes with those of the Pacific Coast--continue to be part of the Antelope Valley and Southern California.

Also advising the museum is Barbara Arvi, director of educational and public programs at the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles.

The Antelope Valley institution was once “a kind of out-of-it museum,” Arvi said, “but they’re making strides forward, huge strides, and moving in the right direction.” She cited such progress as bringing Native American elders and other “tradition bearers” into the interpretive process.

Even if the Antelope Valley facility becomes a popular online museum, Arvi said, she hopes it will attract real as well as virtual visitors. “I don’t think many people know that this little gem sits out there, wherever it is, in Palmdale or Lancaster.”