Phoenix, Arizona – In braided costumes of red, blue, orange and white, the dancers swirl around a sand circle to the chanting of a dozen elderly Indians, all the while balancing up to 30 flexible hoops on their body.
The scene takes place outside a museum in Phoenix, Arizona; the dancers are competing for the world title in the centuries-old tradition of the hoop dance.
Every year, Native Americans from the United States and Canada come together in Phoenix to celebrate the dance. Participants form figures resembling flowers, eagles or the sun by balancing dozens of metre-wide rings on their feet, legs, arms and shoulders and in their mouths.
‘This is a great example of our culture, and of culture in the Southwest,’ says Brian Hammel,
35, a dancer from the Hochunk tribe in West Wisconsin.
The dancers’ annual meeting place, the Heard Museum in Phoenix, pays tribute to Native American culture all year long. With eight exhibits of tribal art, crafts and history, the museum is the ideal starting point to explore Native American culture in the southwestern United States.
Arizona is home to 21 different tribes with an overall population of more than 250,000 people. Reservations and tribal communities occupy over a quarter of the state’s lands.
Local operators offer trips from Arizona’s major cities to the reservations of the Hopi and Navajo tribes, where tourists can eat indigenous foods and learn more about the traditions of America’s first people.
White European settlers also left their imprints on the region. The flow of cowboys, railroad men and gold-diggers to Arizona in the 19th century kicked off the famous Wild West era, traces of which can still be found across the state.
Visitors can walk the streets of violent cowboy ghost towns like Tombstone or try to find forgotten treasures in the remains of former goldmine camps.
Several sites like the Desert Caballeros Western Museum in Wickenburg, the Skull Valley Railroad Depot or Prescott’s Whiskey Row aim to give visitors a real taste of the old Wild West.
Arizona, however, is best known for its natural beauty. The World Heritage Site of the Grand Canyon is in the state’s north-west, where it attracts more than 4 million people annually to explore the Grand Canyon National Park by foot, air, river, mule or train.
Popular activities are wild-water rafting down the Colorado River, jeep tours through the park’s desert landscape and helicopter tours giving a breathtaking overview of the canyon.
But there are other sites off the beaten tracks which are also worth a visit.
The Desert Botanical Gardens in Phoenix showcases more than 50,000 local plants including a vast variety of flowers somewhat unusual in the desert. Small birds and local butterflies including Painted Ladies and the regal Queens are regular guests in the floral gardens.
Possibly the oddest desert site is the so-called Mystery Castle. Built in the 1930s outside Phoenix from trash found in the desert, the house looks like a Wild West version of a Hundertwasser design – with furniture created by America’s best known architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
The house is still inhabited by the builder’s daughter Miss Gulley, who gives tours of her home. From the Mystery Castle it is only a short ride to Frank Lloyd Wright’s former winter residence in Scottsdale.
The architect famous for designing New York’s Guggenheim Museum built a whole complex including a cabaret theatre, a music hall as well as an architectural studio and living space using local rocks and desert sand. Wright’s winter camp is now managed by a foundation and open for public visitors on guided tours.
