North America > United States > Arizona > Phoenix > Articles > Phoenix, Arizona

America is a great place for names. The country that invented modern advertising knew the value of a hard-selling moniker with all the right connotations. But New Jersey couldn't be less like the Channel Islands, thank god, and Philadelphia, city of brotherly love, is one of the most terrifyingly dangerous places in the world. As the white settlers trundled west, they tried to put a bit of gloss on their new railheads and trading posts. Then when they got to Tombstone they just sort of gave up, before meeting up again with the older Spanish names, all those Santas.

In amongst the Spanish devotion and the Yankee hard sell there are dots on the map that are the memorials of earlier inhabitants. The trouble with Indian names is that they usually translate as sentences - 'Place Where Two Rivers Meet and the Eagles Fish on Thursdays' doesn't really fit in with the dot com world, so mostly they're the names of vanished tribes and Anglophobic approximations. The early settlers liked a bit of classical or biblical allusion, as if to give these little adobe villages the patina of ageless class, and you can see what they were getting at with Phoenix.

The city rises out of the hot-as-hell ashes of the desert - also the ashes of the Navajo and Hopi people. It's a good name for a city that is now one of the fastest growing in America, though it's slightly worrying that they seem to think an inhabitant of Phoenix is a Phoenician. You can fly to Phoenix for less than you can to Nice at the moment. True, it's a long haul, but then I'm not doing the hauling. I'd rather fly for ten hours than drive for five, and actually I secretly enjoy long flights. You catch up on movies, read trash and get tucked in by nice young men who offer you Vogue.

It's also true that it would be possible to spend several days in Phoenix trying to get out of the Barry Goldwater International Airport. It has been made with an extraordinary disregard for humans - there are no exit signs. We went for a weekend, which on the face of it sounds like an extravagant waste of time, but was actually painlessly good fun. Why should a weekend abroad mean only the usual European suspects?

Phoenix is a modern city that's grown up through expedience unencumbered by aesthetics. It's not got a lot to look at, certainly not a lot you'd spend ten hours getting to see, but then every year another million or so Americans decide to move out here and they've given the place a stop-go boomtown feel. Phoenix attracts retired folks with the promise of permanent sunshine, relative safety and gated communities. There are plenty of terry towel sun visors and orthopedic tennis shoes and lunchtime special offers, but it's also seeing a boom in high tech industries, picking up the overspill from California. This is a place with spare space and few restrictions; the west, and particularly the desert, has always attracted the mystical and alternative. So the small satellite towns are now America's centre for crystal readers, bone throwers, residential therapies and self-help clinics. Altogether it is a very weird place.

What brings everyone to Phoenix is money and leisure. Out West, leisure means outdoors. Phoenix boasts (if that's quite the right word) 300 golf courses and it's almost impossible to get a tee on any of them. At any one time, a sizeable proportion of the population is chasing a small white ball and avoiding cactuses. It's sometimes difficult to remember that this is a desert and one of the driest places on earth. The water all comes from the mighty Colorado, which has had so much siphoned out of it that it no longer reaches Mexico as much more than a muddy trickle. But if there's one thing worth traveling to Phoenix for it's the Colorado, and particularly its bed, which knocks Tracy Emin off a cliff - the extraordinary Grand Canyon. The best way to see the Canyon is from the air, so we hired a small plane and flew over it, a three-hour trip across the desert. The canyon is everything you've been amazed at in the movies, just more so. It is simply vast, from a country where size is, if not everything, then so damn close to everything that it makes little difference. But just the other side of the canyon is another far less well-known natural marvel that I found quite as remarkable as the painted desert; a long, low flat brush stroke of scrub which had some of the most wonderful and varied colours of any landscape I've seen; ochres, siennas, pinks and mauves and smoky greens, all baked bright under a blue sky. I just sat and watched it shimmer and bake for hours.

This painted desert is the Navajo and Hopi reservation. Now while it's a truism of the west to say that the Indians hated the cowboys, it's also true that they hated each other, if not more, then for longer. The Navajo - a semi nomadic herding people, were constantly at war with the Hopi, a sedentary farming people, and with the sensitivity the Americans are famous for they've plopped the Hopi reservation in the middle of the Navajo one. Indian reservations are not happy places but the Navajo are a tribe relatively rich in money and the Hopi, being sedentary, are rich in artifacts, particularly pottery and those very sellable little votive models called Kachina dolls. These brightly painted feathered puppets represent spirits and figures from votive dances and are extensively collected. The native museum in Phoenix has a wonderful collection of them, donated by Barry Goldwater. (Goldwater's name gets about which shows you how few famous Arizonans there have been - in most countries, he was the sort of hard-nostalgia, tough-talking politician that people would want to forget about, but here in the desert you have to boast about what you can get.)

The dolls themselves are now made solely for the tourist interior design market. No one pretends that these are real religious artifacts. Indeed shops have signs guaranteeing that they are not old or spiritually meaningful, because that would be stealing heritage from folks who have already had far too much nicked from them. So the dolls are decorative authentic, if not original, as they're made by authentic, if not original, Indians. So they have a cultural value if not a spiritual one. Ah, but it's not that simple. The Hopi are, as it were, moral holders of the copyright to Kachina dolls but the Navajo, being traditionally nomadic, never sat down long enough to make them. But now being on a reservation they can, so a lot of the Hopi dolls are in fact being made by Navajo, which in the ultra politically correct ethically spiritually new-ageishly careful community sets a terrible conundrum: do you condone the intellectual theft of one endangered high value group by another? Should they denounce the Navajo dolls as fakes and frauds, thereby piling more cultural, colonial odium on these people, or should they uphold the integrity of the Hopi? The possibilities for hand-wringing guilt in this matter are almost endless. A middle way for the liberal angst-sodden white ethnic art collector is to see the battle of the dolls as being simply a continuation of the millennial battle between Navajo and Hopi that has moved from raiding and hustling to commerce. Here is a very modern piece of consumer diplomacy - that the two tribes are in fact the ethnic equivalent of Coca Cola and Pepsi.

To add an extra, rather delicious twist, the traditional role of Indian as hopeless fighter against the encroachment of white settlers has been taken up by a small tribe of pedal power eco warriors. Off-road mountain biking is a popular pastime here, practiced by the sort of comfortable-off liberal young executives who see a bike as exercise and fun rather than a means of transport. These afternoon outward-bounders have formed a secret radical clan to try and stop what they perceive as the rape of a virgin landscape by rich (richer) immigrants, who build extraordinary and beautiful homes out in the desert. As you fly over Phoenix, you can see masses of multi-million dollar ranch homes being built in the desert amongst the rust red mesas and three-story cactuses. The bikers have started burning them down at night in a forlorn attempt to hold back the waves of progress that Phoenix is attracting with its golf courses. Their language and hopeless anger is a stolen, forged, faked copy of the romanticized language of the Indians a hundred years ago, when they made the same sorts of violent, desperate attempts to keep the bikers' grandfathers at bay. All an outsider can do is laugh.

It all seems to point out an ancient truth - that quarrels and frictions don't go away, they just change partners. The land remains the same, and within are the heady seeds of discontent. As I write a pair of Kachina dolls stare at me from my desk. I have no idea what they represent except a booming tourist industry in a booming state. One has a look of perplexed surprise; the other, a haughty indifference. I don't even know if they like each other.

• More from AA Gill