By Joelle Seligson

This article was published in Museum News, July/August issue of 2007.

After most likely missing sight of this landmark more than once, visitors turn down a dusty road that leads past other Acoma-owned enterprises—the Sky City Community School, the Acoma Food Distribution Program—then arrive at a junction. Turn left, and the scenery changes dramatically. Previously dwarfed by the precipitous terrain, the road is now hundreds of feet above a vast desert valley, patterned with fantastic constructions of rock. The tall ones look like outstretched fingers; thicker structures resemble massive fists of stone.

Nestled in this ancient valley is a very new addition: the Sky City Cultural Center, opened in May 2006. Described by curator Damian Garcia as Acoma’s first “true museum,” the 40,000-square-foot, $17 million center and its built-in Haak’u Museum comprise the largest economic venture ever taken by the tribe, greater even than the booming Sky City Casino Hotel a few miles down the road. In its first year, the center has brought in 66,000 tourists and more than $1.2 million in revenue and expanded its collection to more than 1,000 objects. Its mission: to preserve the past, present and future of the Acoma Pueblo—which, with the center in place, became the first living Native American community to be declared a National Trust Historic Site in January 2007. “We’re here to preserve our culture,” Garcia says. “We’re here to promote Acoma, not only to visitors but also to the tribe. We’re here to help people understand.”

Within this seemingly simple objective lies a much trickier task. The center not only must serve an ancient people living in the 21st century but, with the tribe’s potentially increasing dependence on tourism, it also must cater to a public that expects both state-of-the-art facilities and the chance to experience a culture “suspended in time for two millennia,” as advertised in the center’s brochure. A site that has seen its share of conflict in 2,000 years is now a battleground between past and future, between preservation and adaptation. One requires ritual and solitude, while the other depends on sight-seers and the money they bring with them.

Tourism is the Acoma people’s oldest business enterprise, dating back to the first public tour given of the mesa in 1904. The tribe’s first tourist center, built in 1978, was successful, bringing in more than 100,000 visitors annually at its peak in 2000. But a construction project to expand the building’s kitchen that year sparked a fire that was impossible to extinguish in the arid environment. “[The building] burned to the ground. It was a total loss,” recalls Randy Howarth, the Sky City Cultural Center’s operations manager and, as of June, acting director. Though most of the artifacts survived with no more than smoke damage, the staff was relegated to trailers and tents while continuing to conduct tours for its visitors.

The need for a new center was clear, and the tribe didn’t hesitate. With the support of the pueblo’s governing tribal council, more than 30 focus groups were arranged to discuss the project. Participants ranged “anywhere from out in the general public to the senior sector, to high school and college students . . . to the vendors that sell pottery or have small businesses and then the employees,” remembers Mary Tenorio, who has been with the center for more than 20 years, previously as manager and now as its accountant.

Besides attracting tourists, the top priority that emerged from these sessions was to preserve Acoma’s heritage for today’s tribal members, nearly all 4,000 of whom still reside within a few miles of Sky City. The tribe insisted that the center uphold its legacy as fully as the public interest in it. “[The tribe] didn’t want to lose the culture. They wanted to see something where the younger generation was being taught or got to see Acoma’s traditions,” Tenorio recalls. Classrooms were installed to facilitate this goal; Acoma youngsters now visit the center regularly to learn to craft moccasins, dresses and the thin-walled pottery that is considered the tribe’s greatest handiwork.

As the center was to be used for community activities, tribe members required that the building itself make them feel at home. Out of dozens of submissions, the tribal council chose local architectural firms Barbara Felix Architecture and Design and WoodMetalConcrete to realize its wishes. “They both had never done a project of this scale before. But based off of their existing experience, they proved that they could build a beautiful home. And that’s what we wanted, a beautiful home,” Howarth explains.

The emphasis on “home” has much to do with the Acoma people’s long history at this site. As the elders recount, their ancestors were told that a place had been prepared for them to live. The tribe wandered through the American Southwest, pausing to call out “Haak’u,” which means “a place prepared” in the tribe’s native language of Keresan. Upon reaching the desert valley where Sky City lies, the ancestors’ call reverberated off the mountain peaks and returned to them. “When they got to this valley, they heard their echo, which meant, ‘This is your place,’” Howarth says.

The tribe initially resided on the Enchanted Mesa, a 400-foot-tall hunk of sandstone with drops so straight and sheer it seems the mountain around it was carved away with a knife. Legend tells of a storm that destroyed the sole access route to the mesa top. “One day when all the men and women were down planting the fields, there was a ferocious thunderstorm, and it wiped out the pathways to get up there,” Howarth says. The tribe was forced to move to nearby Sky City. Here they lived peacefully, working the fields and hauling up water from the valley below, until Spanish conquistadors infiltrated and largely enslaved the Acoma in the 1600s. Though Spanish is no longer spoken on the mesa, the intruders’ influence can still be seen in the active San Esteban del Rey Mission—itself on the National Register of Historic Monuments and a Save America’s Treasures site—and the mix of Catholicism with the Acoma’s largely nature-based religion.

To achieve a sense of continuity with the Acoma people’s rich past, the center’s architects relied mainly on materials the tribe typically used for construction: wood, stone, pottery, mud and mica, which is a mineral that can be easily separated into thin, transparent sheets. They strove for a seamless blend of the structure and its desert surroundings, and indeed its sandstone exterior and dirt parking lot make a good fit. Inside, there is hardly a square inch that hasn’t been infused with a traditional feel, from the doors carved to resemble 19th-century textiles to the patterned storm drains outside. Huge pine trunks, or vigas, inlaid with fragrant cedar support the ceiling of the main lobby, much like the ceiling of the San Esteban church. Micaceous flakes are embedded into windows looking out onto the mesa and surrounding valley, recalling the original windows in the homes above. The T-shaped entranceways resemble ruins in nearby Chaco Canyon, where the Acomas believe their ancestors stopped for a time during the search for their “place prepared.”

The response to the building’s attention to detail has been interesting to observe, according to Howarth. Tourists, consisting mainly of visitors from California, Utah, Texas and Colorado, “stare at the ceiling for two minutes when they walk in,” he claims. “People run into each other because the building’s so beautiful.” Acoma tribe members visiting the center express a “sense of pride,” Garcia says, adding, “Tribal members have come to utilize this space like it’s their own—because it is their own. It’s a tribal building.”

	Though it is designed to suit the tribe’s needs, the need to attract tourists is a key concern for the center—and perhaps a growing one.

The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act requires states to establish “compacts” governing tribal gambling. There is a possibility that the Sky City Casino, currently the Acomas’ main source of income, may not get its compact renewed when its current term expires in 2015. “There are a lot of political reasons why it wouldn’t be signed again,” Garcia explains. “The governor now is faced with other businesses that want to get into the gaming industry, such as horseback racing and dog racing and other competing businesses, such as ski resorts and other tourist destinations.”

In the face of this potential loss, the tribe is placing more of its hopes on the center. Garcia aims to increase the center’s annual audience, which dropped after the fire—and even more so after Sept. 11, 2001—to its historic rates of 100,000 per year.

A key contributor to this goal is the Haak’u Museum, which takes up nearly 22,000 square feet of the center’s space. Counting the smoke-damaged artifacts from the original center, its collection comprises more than 1,000 objects. Garcia, who as the former director of the Acoma Historic Preservation Office is the only center employee with museum experience, recently developed the museum’s first collections policy. He also has a 15-year strategic plan to fill the center’s now largely empty archival spaces with 100,000 of the nearly 1 million Acoma objects estimated to be in various collections throughout the nation. They will be gathered by accepting donations from Acoma families, purchasing works using the tribe’s acquisitions fund and collaborating with the institutions that hold the majority of these objects, such as the National Museum of the American Indian and Maxwell Museum of Anthropology. With more works of its own to display, the Haak’u Museum will open a permanent exhibition in 2009 called “Haak’u: A Place Prepared,” which will trace Acoma history from the earliest known archaeological records to the tribe’s present-day—but conventionally designed—creations.

Of course, not everything in the center can be considered purely traditional. Though great efforts were made to build in the customary style—even running all power lines and fiber optics underground from the casino so as not to sully the view from the mesa—the center includes many of the features that modern tourists expect. It is wired with T1 Internet access and a security system; preparing the staff for the new technology, Howarth says, was the biggest challenge of the center’s first year. The only elevator on the pueblo was installed there to accommodate both visitors and large artifacts joining the museum’s collection. And while the Yaak’a (Corn) Café uses locally grown crops to serve traditional dishes like fruit pies, oven bread and Acoma stew with lamb, it also offers tacos, veggie burgers and, as the menu proudly announces, Starbucks coffee.

Outside the center, small, sleek white shuttles have replaced the passenger vans and buses originally used for transporting guests to the top of Sky City. Just a few hundred yards from the state-of-the-art center, the adobe homes where 13 or so Acoma families still live on the mesa year-round—some for the peace and quiet, others appointed to stay for religious reasons—are without electricity or running water. The round ends of vigas can be seen jutting through the mud walls of the homes, which are lit with kerosene lamps and propane lanterns. The similarly constructed walls inside the San Esteban del Rey Mission, trimmed in pink and adorned with vibrantly painted parrots, flowers and rainbows, hold religious lithographs that have hung there untouched since 1841.

Yet boxes of Tide and Bounty can be seen through the homes’ windows, now fashioned with screens rather than mica. To compensate for the lack of indoor plumbing, nearly two dozen outhouses dot the once-empty area outside the active church and cemetery. Children, visiting their grandparents, and a few young Acoma adults lean in doorways wearing T-shirts adorned with university names and sports team logos. Women still station tables outside their homes to sell pots and other trinkets as they have done for decades—but now “cold Diet Coke” is listed as an additional menu option.

These physical touches of 21st-century culture do not seem to have altered the mindset of some Acoma women, who are considered the heads of household in this matriarchal society. Daisy R. Lewis has lived on the mesa all her life; her family has been here for six generations. At the table of pottery next to her adobe front porch, Lewis sells her wares to visitors to the Sky City Cultural Center—yet she has never been there. She attended a few of the preliminary focus groups, however, where she says she encouraged the center’s staff to display artifacts from specific periods in Acoma history, such as pottery pieces and baskets from the 16th and 17th centuries.

Whether this need has been fully met, she isn’t sure, but judging from the center’s exterior it is “too modern” for her taste, an opinion Lewis asserts is shared by the majority of the tribe. “We’re not experts at [construction], but with the suggestions made by tribal members, they could’ve made it more traditional looking,” she says, in particular citing the building’s multicolored walls (different shades of sandstone instead of adobe’s solid brown hue) as too much of a stray.

Not everyone agrees with Lewis. Some tribe members simply describe the center as “very pretty, very nice”; others praise the new center’s facilities, such as the in-progress tribal library, as a step up from the old one’s. Donna Garcia-Chino, granddaughter of one of the tribe’s most celebrated potters, notes with pride that she was asked to demonstrate her family’s pottery-making skills at the center’s grand opening last year. But Irene Castillo, whose family history on the mesa dates back 12 generations or more, maintains that the center represents too much of a “white man’s style.” She says she would have added elements with a more Native American tone, such as the open fireplace her grandmother once used to bake paper bread. “[The center] should have something like that,” Castillo says. “This is what we used to do; we should show them that this is how we lived.” 

While urging the center to focus on preserving and relating Acoma history, the tribe also has cautioned staff not to give away too many details about their customs—a difficult task in an age when the public feels increasingly entitled to information. Lewis complains of a particular tour guide who goes far beyond the “limited information” she says should be revealed to visitors.

	“It’s like my pottery. I could explain the pot’s four sides,” she says, gesturing to a piece designed with a typical Acoma motif representing the four directions, “but that’s it. There’s more to it, but it’s very sacred. It should be private.”

Limiting transparency is a key concern for the center’s staff, especially given the secret rituals associated with the tribe’s religion. “Even our tour guides know that our job is first and foremost to preserve and protect the history and culture,” Howarth says, noting that there are certain areas that visitors cannot enter or photograph, such as the mesa’s church and cemetery. “It is a gratifying challenge to work at a place that [says], yes, we’re welcome to customers, we want to share the history and culture, but we also want to protect it.”

To avoid the constant flow of students, tour groups and employees on department retreats in the center, a repatriation room filled with items of cultural patrimony is accessible only by the tribal council and religious leaders. In addition, during days of private cultural activities on the mesa—the rites of which Howarth says he is not at liberty to discuss—the center closes so that the entire Acoma tribe can congregate in seclusion. This is not an ideal situation economically. Several of the celebrations occur in summer, when the average daily attendance increases from 20 during the winter to 800 or more; closing on these days hurts the center’s chances of meeting its goal of welcoming at least 100,000 visitors annually. Regardless, Tenorio says this is simply a reality of tribal life that will not change to accommodate tourists’ preferences.

Tenorio also contends that the majority of the tribe is comfortable with the new center’s contemporary aspects. She notes the center’s many traditional features: the pottery used for its chimney tops, the whitewashed walls, the floors that look like sand. “Yeah, we do things on computer now, which is necessary to do to run a business, but the building itself, the history it tells—those are traditional,” she says.

Not only has the center received “a lot of compliments” from tribe members, according to Tenorio, but it is also setting an example for other tribes that are working to create their own enterprises. Garcia says that inspiring fellow tribes has become another of the center’s primary objectives. “We’re trying to be an industry . . . model for other Native American tribes in developing buildings, museums, tribal programs—to be a development model for success,” he says. “We want others to be successful, for other native tribes to follow along.”

In the future, the Acomas plan to adjust the center’s structure and content to suit the community’s developments. The museum will continue to embrace the tribe’s new creations—so long as they don’t disregard its age-old customs. As Tenorio puts it, “A long time ago, the pottery was made thin, but all the implements they used were things that were there at that time. Now people have come up with something better to use, to make it smoother. It doesn’t change the value of the pottery, it doesn’t change the meaning of it; it’s just a simpler tool.”

Beyond simply highlighting the tribe’s innovations over time, the display of modern objects—and the implementation of modern tools—perhaps best communicates the main message Howarth says the center aims to convey. That the people of Acoma are able to acclimate to the 21st century is a statement by a people who have managed to maintain and remain in their community longer than any other in America. Despite the concessions that must be made to a contemporary world, this is one fact that remains unchanged. The Acomas are preparing their place for another few thousand years.

Joelle Seligson is associate editor of Museum News. Photos by Jonathan Wade.