On a winter morning in 1941, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Hopi artist Fred Kabotie posed for a picture with the First Lady of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt (Fig. 9.1). The pair stands in front of a reconstructed kiva mural from Awatovi, a once-thriving Hopi community that had been abandoned in the early eighteenth century. This mural, depicting dancing and masked figures, was one of several painted by Kabotie with help from three of his Hopi art students, Victor Cootswytewa, Herbert Komoyousie, and Charles Loloma, for the museum's exhibition Indian Art of the United States. Although the photograph offers no sense of the museum's interior space, a press release describes the murals as appearing in a reconstructed kiva (defined by the MoMA as an ‘underground ceremonial chamber’). Neither the museum press releases nor the exhibition catalog comment on the fact that these paintings were originally created at a site legendary for its contamination. The museum also remained silent about the violence witnessed at Awatovi in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, violence unleashed to purify this place.

The successive waves of ‘contamination’ and ‘purification’ so integral to Awatovi's legacy reveal how tangled the relationships between these two seemingly incompatible yet coupled notions can become. It is not especially surprising the museum said nothing about Awatovi's complicated history. Pablo Picasso's Guernica – a painting intimately bound to modern violence and warfare – had been exhibited at the MoMA just a year earlier, but colonial conflagrations of the past, and among the Hopi, figured in a wholly other register.