Clara Lee Tanner
Writer
1905–1997
“I think that the Southwest itself has something you can’t put your fingers on — it just is,” Clara Lee Tanner said in the 1980s, near the end of a long career spent studying and writing about Indigenous arts, crafts and ways of life. “And it is beautiful, and it is vast,” she continued. “I think it was rather natural that my interests in the Southwest would end up in Native art.”
Born Clara Lee Fraps in North Carolina, she spent most of her life in Tucson, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in archaeology from the University of Arizona. She subsequently taught there for 50 years and authored several university-published books on Southwestern tribal art. Early in that tenure, she also began contributing to Arizona Highways at a time when the magazine was still primarily an engineering publication.
Her first byline, before her marriage to John Tanner, came in March 1931, when she wrote about centuries-old customs still retained by Arizona’s tribes — a subject in line with her long-standing interest in documenting cultural continuity. Her subsequent work included features on prehistoric agriculture and Native turquoise jewelry. And in August 1945, her Shepherds of the Desert, on Navajo shepherding and weaving practices, accompanied Joseph Miller’s famous cover photo of a young Navajo girl with her lamb.
Few, if any, writers can claim as long an association with Arizona Highways as Tanner; hers continued into the late 1980s, when she was listed on the masthead as a senior contributing editor. In 1993, she received a lifetime achievement award from the National Museum of Women in the Arts. In nominating her for that award, fellow longtime contributor Barry Goldwater wrote, “I don’t think I have ever known a man or woman who has done more for the culture, history and understanding of the American Indian in the Southwest than Ms. Tanner.”
— Noah Austin
Arizona Highways inaugural Hall of Fame Inductees