Photo by Paul Carbone, AV&C New York - George Ramos (center), a Tlingit elder from Yakutat, Alaska, joins a dance during the opening ceremony for the exhibition “Living our Cultures, Sharing our Heritage.” Ramos, 79, is one of the advisers to the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center, which brought the exhibition to the Anchorage Museum.

They “belong to Alaska,” Ramos says.

Now, “Living Our Cultures, Sharing Our Heritage” has opened at the Anchorage Museum, with 600 objects that were selected in part because they were fairly traded by Native communities to collectors over a century ago and ended up in the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of the American Indian. The exhibition of the objects will continue for seven years in Alaska.

The May 22 opening was a cause for celebration by Alaska Native peoples, among them Beverly Faye Hugo, an Iñupiaq adviser to the exhibition from Barrow.

“These are our treasures,” Hugo said. “It is time to let them come home.”

The Git-hoan, a Tsimshian dance group based in Seattle, performed at the exhibition’s opening celebration. At one point, the group invited the Native peoples of Alaska to join the dance. Midway through the song, group leader David Boxley called out, “On stage, George Ramos, a leader of leaders.”

The stage cleared as Ramos danced with his hands stretched upward, knees bent, as he was taught at age 8 by his mother’s brother, a man of 80. When the song ended, young people came to steady Ramos, an adviser to the Arctic Studies Center, as he stepped down from the stage.

“There are things in the exhibition I have only heard about from my instructor when I was a child,” Ramos said.

The objects selected for the exhibition were all fairly traded for, said William Fitzhugh, director of the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center. It was part of the criteria put forth in seven years of meetings between elders from the Native cultures of Alaska and museum curators.

Photo by Clark Mishler of Clark James Mishler Photography - Mitzi Mishler sits in the Anchorage Museum in front of Clark Mishler’s photo of Vera Spein with willow bows and a traditional ulu near Kwethluk, Alaska.

“Living Our Cultures, Sharing Our Heritage” is the most ambitious exhibition organized by the center since its inception in 1988, and the Anchorage Museum constructed a 10,000-square-foot addition to house it. The curators and conservators from the National Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of the American Indian worked together to conserve and repair the objects for the loan, then to transport them to Alaska in three cargo planes. The exhibition will continue for at least seven years, at which time other items from the tens of thousands of Alaska Native objects in the Smithsonian collections are expected to rotate in.

Fitzhugh knows the impact of these exhibitions on Native cultures, because the Arctic Studies Center has organized them for years, bringing objects from Smithsonian museums and others around the world to Alaska. With each exhibition, Fitzhugh said there has been a growing rejuvenation and recovery of cultural practices.

“There is a type of blanket that until 15 years ago was lost. Everyone knows the Chilkat blankets, but this was another woven blanket,” Fitzhugh said. “They have figured out how to weave it because today David Boxley was wearing one.”

Andrew Abyo, a 40-year-old Alutiiq carver who teaches Native arts in Anchorage schools, stood in front of a Sugpiaq wood mask he’d only seen in books. Twenty inches tall, and three-dimensional with marks left by the carver still evident, the mask was collected in 1884 from a village on the Alaska Peninsula.

Shaking his head, Abyo said, “It was so flat and small in the book.”

His wife, Melinda, was moved to tears when she saw a century-old woman’s beaded headdress, which she had copied from a book. She brought in her replica to show curators, and to compare it with the original.

Abyo, whose work is in museums in Alaska, Japan and Ireland, wants the tools of his ancestors’ everyday life, such as  bows and fishing gear. But gaining the skill that it takes to make tools that are functional as well as beautiful requires more than books.

“As many accomplished artists as there are today, these are the works of the masters,” Abyo said. “They didn’t have our technologies, but we don’t know all of their technologies, either. We can’t fathom how they did some of this.”

Another visitor, Darline Kygar, a tourist from San Diego who happened to visit the museum on the day the exhibition opened, admired the intricate stitching in the clothing and the diversity of the many Native cultures from Alaska.

“I really had my eyes opened,” she said.

View the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center website, including the objects in the exhibition, at http://alaska.si.edu/index.asp

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By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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Courtesy of the National Congress of American Indians Odessa Lozano’s “Stand Tall and Be Counted!” was the first-place winner for grades 11 and 12 in the National Congress of American Indians’ student art contest celebrating the 2010 U.S. Census. Lozano is San Carlos Apache from Arizona.

The second-place winner at the college level, Julius Badoni, a senior at Arizona State University, said he wanted to incorporate symbols of perseverance, tribal pride, and strength, while encouraging Native Americans to participate in the Census.

“Even at the lowest point in the 1900s, Native Americans endured,” said Badoni, who is Navajo, about his piece titled “Resurgence,” a colorful abstract showing the plight of Native people since 1492. “There will be a continued endurance and resurgence of Native Americans.”

The contest was judged by staff at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

“One of the most successful messages from the Census is that tribes are thriving and doing well, and the attempts to completely assimilate Native people into mainstream America weren’t successful,” said Jacqueline Johnson Pata, NCAI executive director. “This art competition was to showcase that Native people are still here.”

The 1990 Census failed to count an estimated 12,000 people living on reservations; an aggressive promotional campaign in 2000 helped to reduce the number of those missed to an estimated 4,000. The NCAI’s contest gave young artists a chance to learn about the Census, and why it is important for their families to participate.

The youngest winners, who were pre-kindergarten, received a LeapFrog Leapster2 Learning System or a Tag Learn to Read Storybook Pack. Winners in first through third grades received a Nintendo DSiXL or a LeapFrog Tag Dr. Seuss Reading Gift Pack. Winners in fourth grade through college were awarded a Wii or an iPod Nano.
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By The American Indian News Service

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Photo by Nick Vanderpuy, Courtesy of News from Indian Country. Dennis White, who is Ojibwe, teaches the ancient art of finger weaving at a workshop sponsored by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. The event was held on the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation in Wisconsin, where White works as administrator of the tribal school.

Last year White was one of four recipients of a residency from the Artist Leadership program at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. White spent two weeks in Washington, D.C., studying the museum’s collection of finger-woven sashes and bags worn in Ojibwe culture.

“Finger weaving was at one time an important and widespread art among our people in the Great Lakes, but now there are not that many people in Wisconsin and Michigan that actually do the weaving at the advanced level,” White said.

He conducted two workshops, one at the museum in Washington, and the other—a three-day gathering—at the Migizi Cultural Center at the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Community College in late February.

White taught himself the art of finger weaving from books in the early 1980s when he was studying for his master’s degree in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He subsequently consulted with elders who knew the craft and became one of the few living Ojibwe finger weavers.

“Before the Europeans came we would use fur that fell off any creature, like the hair you comb off a dog or cat, and spin that into a fiber for weaving,” he said. “When the Europeans came with blankets, we unraveled their blankets for the yarn. We already had blankets made from rabbit skin, and their blankets weren’t as warm.”

White, who works as the administrator at the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe School, www.lcoschools.bia.edu, also has been known to use finger weaving as a way to teach mathematics to young people.

“To me there is a fine line and almost no line between mathematics and art,” White said. “The designs I make for my belts and sashes, they start out as a set of symbols.

“If I have a problem weaving that is probably a number problem,” he said. “If you can recognize the patterns you are on your way to understanding mathematics.”

Learn about the National Museum of the American Indian’s Expressive Arts Program at www.americanindian.si.edu/icap/recipients.html.

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By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

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