2022 Fall History Highlight

The Old Trails Museum offers its 2022 Fall History Highlight on Saturday, October 29, at 2 pm, when ethnobotanist Carrie Cannon presents For the Love of Turquoise. The free presentation takes place at the Winslow Arts Trust Museum at La Posada Hotel, 303 East Second Street.

Found on six continents, turquoise forms in arid regions through the process of water seeping through rock and interacting with copper, aluminum, and iron deposits. Cannon explores the history of this wondrous stone in the Southwest, where it has a compelling story and distinctive cultural style all its own.

Turquoise has a long-standing significance amongst Native cultures of the Southwest, where it holds profound meanings to specific tribes who have used it decoratively for millennia. Even before the more contemporary tradition of combining silver with turquoise, cultures throughout the Southwest used turquoise in necklaces, earrings, mosaics, fetishes, and medicine pouches. They also made bracelets of basketry stems lacquered with piñon resin and inlaid turquoise.

Cannon is a member of the Kiowa tribe of Oklahoma and is also of Oglala Lakota descent. She has a B.S. in Wildlife Biology and an M.S. in Resource Management. She has worked as an ethnobotanist for the Hualapai Tribe of Peach Springs since 2005, administering projects for the Hualapai Department of Cultural Resources that promote the intergenerational teaching of Hualapai ethnobotanical knowledge and ensure that it will persist as a living practice and tradition.

The 2022 Fall History Highlight is made possible in part by Arizona Humanities, a non-profit organization and the Arizona affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. For the latest updates on all of the Old Trails Museum’s exhibits and programs, “like” the museum on Facebook.