What is the S’edav Va’aki Museum Indian Market?
The S’edav Va’aki Museum Indian Market is a two-day outdoor market of more than 100 Native artists, held every December on the grounds of the City of Phoenix’s archaeological museum at 44th Street and Washington, the site most people still know as Pueblo Grande. The 49th market runs December 12–13, 2026, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and admission is $10, museum included. Jewelry, pottery, baskets, textiles, paintings and carvings are sold by the people who made them, all of it handmade and compliant with the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, which is the market’s standing rule for every booth.
The setting is the point. The booths go up beside the Hohokam platform mound and the ballcourt described in the site’s own guide to the S’edav Va’aki Museum, which also explains the 2023 renaming and the thousand-year history of the place; this guide does not repeat it. What matters for market weekend is that the land belongs to the O’odham story, and the market leans into it: the performers and food vendors come largely from the Salt River and Gila River communities, and the 2026 featured artist, Antoinette Pinon, is a Pee Posh potter from Gila River who digs her own clay, shapes it with paddle and anvil, paints it with red earth and finishes it with black tree sap, the way her grandmother Vesta Bread and her mother Phyllis Cerna did.
For a Scottsdale visitor it is the closest and cheapest Native market on the calendar: 15 minutes from Old Town, with a light-rail station across the street, on a December weekend when the resorts are full and the big markets are months away.
How to do it
Tickets. Buy online through the museum foundation’s site or pay at the gate; there is rarely a line before 9:30. The $10 ticket is good for the museum galleries, rebuilt in a renovation that closed the building for the summer of 2026, and the two-thirds-mile trail. Foundation membership is $35 a year and gets you in free, which pays for itself if you also come for the Thursday evenings or the foundation’s spring Harmony walk on the mound.
Getting there and parking. From Old Town take Scottsdale Road south, which becomes Galvin Parkway through Papago Park, west on Van Buren to 44th Street and south to Washington; the museum lot is on the southeast corner and it is free. It fills by about 10:30 on Saturday. The 44th Street/Washington light-rail station is across the street; from Tempe, park at the Dorsey/Apache or Sycamore lots and ride west. If you are flying out of Sky Harbor that afternoon, the Sky Train connects to the same station, which makes this the only art market in the Valley you can do on the way to a flight.
What to see besides the booths. Hands-on demonstrations in the Ki:him, the replica village, cover beading, gourd art, weaving, pottery and hoop dancing. The main stage runs music and dance both days; in 2025 it was hoop dancer Tony Duncan, Gertie and the T.O. Boyz, the O’odham dance group Chi’Chino Spirit, guitarist Gabriel Ayala and Jazzmenco, with tribal royalty presentations in between. A Young Artist Market gives children and teenagers their own tables, and it is where to spend $20 that will matter to someone.
What to eat. The foundation bills O’odham cuisine alongside the art, and the food booths are run by community vendors; expect fry bread and popovers and a line that peaks at noon. Eat at 11 or after 1:30.
What to skip. Do not plan to see the whole museum on market day; the galleries are crowded and the mound is the better use of half an hour. And do not expect the scale of the Heard: this is a hundred booths, not six hundred, which is exactly why you can talk to every maker.
A market that outgrew its museum and came back
The museum’s own history puts the first annual Indian Market in 1977, the year the Pueblo Grande Museum Auxiliary was founded to give the city’s one-building archaeology museum the volunteers it badly needed; the market was the auxiliary’s project from the start. Phoenix New Times adds that in 1978 Governor Bruce Babbitt formally established the Hohokam Commemoration and Indian Market Days and that more than 3,000 people came that year. The city’s document calls the market the largest in the state, which was true for a time: by its 27th year, according to Phoenix New Times, the Pueblo Grande Museum Auxiliary Indian Market had moved off the grounds entirely to Steele Indian School Park on Central Avenue, the same park that now hosts M3F Fest. It later returned to the museum at a smaller scale, which suits it. The market’s 48 years under the Pueblo Grande name ended in 2023; the December 2025 market was the third as S’edav Va’aki.
How the booths are chosen
Artists apply through the S’edav Va’aki Museum Foundation, which took over the auxiliary’s role, and every piece sold must be handmade by an enrolled member of a federally or state-recognized tribe under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act. The museum’s association picks a featured artist each year with a bias toward the southern tribes whose ancestors built the site: Salt River’s August Wood, a paddle-and-anvil potter taught by the late Ron Carlos, in 2025; Gila River’s Antoinette Pinon in 2026. Museum administrator Nicole Armstrong-Best describes the market as the weekend when people from every community in the Valley connect with tribal artists on the artists’ own terms. The site’s note on buying Native American art covers what to ask and what a fair price looks like; the short version here is that you are buying from the maker, so ask about the clay, the dye, the stone and the hours.
Why it belongs on a Scottsdale calendar
Scottsdale’s Native art calendar runs from the Arizona Indian Festival on the Civic Center in February to the Heard Museum Indian Fair and Market in March, and both are bigger. S’edav Va’aki is the December one, and the intimate one: a hundred makers, $10, a mound to climb, O’odham food, and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community’s own artists and dancers fifteen minutes from the Scottsdale hotels that sit on the community’s border. If you are in town for the holidays and want one morning that is about the people who were here first, this is it.