Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian
704 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe, NM
Boston aristocrat Mary Cabot Wheelwright first came to the Southwest in 1918 on a trip to the Navajo reservation in New Mexico and Arizona. Her visit, the first of many, instilled a lifelong interest in Navajo art and culture.
After the deaths of both her parents, Wheelwright began to travel the world at the age of 39 in 1917. Always interested in outdoor life and conservation, Wheelwright made repeated trips to New Mexico, staying at the San Gabriel Ranch, a “dude ranch” in Alcalde, New Mexico, outside of Santa Fe. From here, she made excursions onto the Navajo reservation and to the various trading posts in the area. She became interested in Navajo weaving, collecting and archiving historic patterns. To help the then poor market for the rugs and blankets, Wheelwright worked out an arrangement with trading post operator Cozy McSparron of the L.H. McSparron Trading Post in Chinle, Arizona. She provided brightly colored material and patterns to make old-style designs which she sold in two shops she opened in Boston and Northeast Harbor, Maine. Any profits from the endeavor were directed back to the project.
In 1921, Wheelwright met Navajo medicine man Hastiin Klah at the Newcomb Trading Post in Nava. She asked Klah to document the patterns of traditional sand paintings by weaving them into tapestries. This interest led to another collaboration. While Wheelwright was interested in learning about the Navajo religion, Klah was concerned with its demise. After years of clashes with the U.S. Army, deportation to the Bosque Redondo and the suppression of traditional culture by the Americans, many elders and medicine men had died and along with them the knowledge of sacred rituals. Together Klah and Wheelwright set about assembling and preserving articles and recordings of the Navajo ceremonies and gathering this documentation in a museum repository called the House of Navajo Religion.
In 1927, Wheelwright offered to fund a Navajo Unit of the Laboratory of Anthropology for this purpose. However, plans for the structure, designed by local architect William Penhallow Henderson, were not in the preferred “Santa Fe Style” but instead designed as a Navajo ceremonial hogan. The Laboratory’s architectural committee rejected the idea. Wheelwright’s friend, Amelia Elizabeth White, offered to help by donating 8.32 acres adjoining the Laboratory’s property for the museum in 1932. With a site secured, Wheelwright did fund the construction of the building, completed, and dedicated in November 1937.
After her good friend Klah’s death in 1937, Wheelwright only traveled to New Mexico for annual visits to attend board meetings, living most of her remaining years in her little house on Sutton Island off the coast of Maine. In 1956, Paul Jones, Chairman of the Navajo Tribal Council, thanked Mary Cabot Wheelwright for her “undertaking with courage what could only be accomplished in the most intangible awareness of spiritual tranquility and symbolic beauty.”
The House of Navajo Religion is an octagonal, clipped pyramidal-roofed structure, with flat-roofed, rectangular extensions projecting east and west. No doors or windows can be see from the public approach, giving it a solid, unyielding appearance. The adobe-colored concrete walls and roof add to its monolithic presence. While its appearance suggests a one-story building, a lower story, below grade, is hidden from exterior view. Inside, the ceiling, with central skylight, is composed of 157 interconnecting logs, echoing the whirling logs seen in the Navajo Creation Myth.