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read also: American Indians
Some see life as a ladder, a road, a river or a series of peaks and valleys. Not Joyce
Herold, the longtime curator of ethnology at the Denver Museum of Nature &
Science.
A nationally known expert on native cultures, she likes to think of life as a basket, formed out of coils of experience interwoven with
knowledge, passion and tradition.
Her own life's container is far from finished, of course, although Herold is climbing gradually toward the
rim. At 72, she is retiring in December after more than 35 years immersed in a milieu of baskets,
rugs, pots, tools, clothing and other everyday items - "the grungy parts of
life."
Such materials - old and new, from this country and abroad - "are central to how she explores
humanity," says her colleague and one-time protégé, Ella Maria Ray.
"She looks at baskets, and textiles generally, as a reflection of the way in which families and
communities, our whole planet, are woven together. She's able to see not just the
objects, but the human beings behind them."
To Herold, who intends to continue her work as an emeritus curator, all artifacts have stories to tell - some
matter-of-fact, some symbolic.
One large basket she acquired for the museum in the 1970s, for example, was woven at her request by an old woman known at the time as the best basketmaker in the Jicarilla Apache nation of northern New Mexico, about a 45-minute drive south of Pagosa
Springs.
A frail, white-haired virtuoso, the weaver was named Tanzanita Pesata, and she lived such a secluded life that a trader who regularly bought her wares from her son had never seen her.
Herold met her for the first time simply by walking up to her home and knocking boldly on the door.
"I didn't speak Jicarilla Apache, but what I came armed with was some old baskets out of our
collection," she recalls. "It worked. She was very interested in what I had."
The basket, woven a few years later and now in the Denver museum collection, took about four months to
make, was purchased for about $100 and would fetch about $2,000 on the open market
today, Herold says.
Slipping on a pair of white gloves to protect it from the natural oils in her skin, she pulls the piece from one of about 20
large, metal cabinets where scores of artifacts are stored under lock and
key.
"Can you smell it? That's sumac. It continues to be fragrant," she
says, tracing the spiraling stitches with a care bordering on reverence, as if she were fingering the beads of a
rosary.
The basket, a sturdy, pan-shaped implement with foundation rods made of willow, could have been used to gather acorns or other
food. But its bold colors and big "butterfly" pattern show it wasn't merely a utilitarian
piece, she notes.
The four-armed design, mapped out in the weaver's mind before she began, incorporates aspects of the tribe's origin
myth. For ceremonial reasons, the base and rim - the start and finish - had to be created in full sunlight and completed in a single
day.
"To Tanzanita," Herold says, "the whole basket was like a prayer - for long
life, good health and everything beautiful."
Herold, a white woman so respected by native peoples that she has been given an honorary Tlingit name and taken part in a Jicarilla coming-of-age
ceremony, grew up in Texas as a first-generation American in a Czechoslovakian immigrant's
family.
She got her first taste of ethnographic field study in high school, doing a paper on the folklore of warts and wart
curing. It won honorable mention in the Westinghouse Science Talent
Search.
A National Merit Scholar (her school's first), she majored in anthropology and sociology at the University of
Colorado, graduated with highest honors in 1955, and launched her career by spending summers at Mesa Verde with her
husband, Larry, a now-retired geographer who worked as a seasonal ranger.
But although she delved deeply into the Anasazi - suggesting in her masters thesis that high elevations and short growing seasons may have been as big a factor in their disappearance as drought - she came to realize that prehistory wasn't her chief interest.
"I could never have been a dirt archaeologist," Herold confesses now. "I wanted to work with living people and what they made and used in their lives."
Gradually, she discovered a field she says was "little emphasized in academic
anthropology" at the time - American Indian material culture. She grounded herself by studying
"all things Indian" at the Colorado History Museum and Denver Art Museum, and capped that with a fellowship that sent her to the Jicarilla
reservation. She later became an expert on other basketmakers - from the Havasupai tribe in the Grand Canyon to the Hmong people of Southeast
Asia, the latter a culture she first learned about through refugees who migrated to the Denver area beginning in the mid-1970s.
She has long felt drawn to baskets, she says, because "baskets are a woman's thing - women appreciate the detail, the
weaving, the stitchery," and because baskets are used not merely for decoration but to hold the staples of
life.
"I liked the variety, and the idea that you can see the hand of the weaver in the final product. ... You can fake ceramics or just about any other art
form, but you can't fake a basket."
A former president of the Native American Art Studies Association, Herold also is an authority on textiles and beadwork - especially trade
beads, which she has studied for years as the leader of a group of about 30 other
aficionados.
"I love seeing her examine a new piece," says Elizabeth Bennett, a Denver importer of African art who knows Herold
well. "Her eyes light up, her face lights up, and I know it's a cliché, but there's a childlike sense of wonder about her. She sees things differently from people who don't have her understanding and her discerning
eye."
In her 37 years at the Denver museum, Bennett says, Herold "has built an absolutely world-class Native American
collection, with enormous sensitivity to the rights of the peoples
involved."
The core of the collection - one of the largest in the country - consists of 12,000 objects donated to the museum in the late 1960s, when its North American Hall was just taking
shape. Herold arrived in time to help unpack everything from tomahawks to totem
poles, and played a lead role in documenting the items and modernizing the way in which the best of them would eventually be
exhibited.
Over the years, Herold augmented the museum's holdings through her own ethnographic field research in the
Southwest, Southeast Asia and southern Africa - expeditions on which she was sometimes accompanied by her husband and their
son, Evan, who now works in Denver in marketing specialized medical
equipment.
"She's just a wealth of knowledge - about the institution, about the
collections, about Southwest archaeology in general," says Steve Holen, the museum's curator of
archaeology. "And she's friendly, thoughtful and always ready to help people identify
things."
Classic
American Indian Movies Buy New at Amazon: $5.98
Indian Beading: Of all the peoples who have made beadwork a part of their culture, it's arguable that the Native Americans have brought it to its highest artistic levels. Many people think only of wampum and necklaces when they think of Indian beading, but traditionally there's much more to it than that. That's the topic we explore in the following article.
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