Moab Museum | Interpretation
By: Tara Beresh, Curatorial and Collections Manager If you’re local to Moab or a longtime visitor to the Moab Museum, you may be aware of the renowned “burden” basket—an extraordinary ancestral relic, iconic to the area and sacred to proximate Native groups. The cone-shaped basket is styled to be worn like a backpack, is woven…
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This winter, the Moab Museum has come alive with color. A wide array of intricately carved and vibrantly painted katsintithu – widely known as “kachina dolls”– are on exhibit through February 2022. The temporary exhibition entitled Hopi Katsina: Evolving Styles, Enduring Meanings, offers a glimpse into the flourishing cultural and creative tradition of Hopi katsintithu…
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By: Tara Beresh, Curatorial & Collections Manager If you live in the Southwest, you’ve likely encountered brightly painted carved figurines in gift shops. You may have even purchased one. To the average non-Native, “kachina dolls” are a beautiful representation of Southwest Native American culture. The human figures, reminiscent of local ancestral rock imagery, has even…
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“There’s always variations of understanding of how sites [were] used by Ancestors,” explained Bertram Tsavadawa on a recent summer morning, standing alongside a petroglyph panel near the Colorado River. Tsavadawa, a Hopi guide, belongs to the corn clan from the village of Old Oraibi, 3rd Mesa in Arizona. He joined Don Montoya, a retired archeologist,…
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Cultural Material Acquisition and Exhibition at the Moab Museum Tara Beresh, Curatorial and Collections Manager, Moab Museum Museums worldwide have been criticized for the controversial display of indigenous objects. In years past, the Moab Museum showcased prehistoric ancestral objects such as ceramics, basketry, projectile points, and sandals. Some visitors admired these objects, inquiring: How old…
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