Before it opened, founders of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian heard from Native peoples that one of its most important roles would be to teach all children the true history of the Americas.

By Marilu Lopez Fretts - Tim Johnson, Associate Director for Museum Programs, the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian

In this undertaking, I cannot overstate the importance of what José Martí, the Cuban poet and thinker, wrote in his 1891 manifesto, “Our America.” He stated, “The American intelligence is an Indian headdress.”  What Martí was saying grew out of his observation that human progress must not only factor in economic considerations, but must also include social, cultural, and familial dimensions. He came to this understanding by listening to what Indians had to say.

I think one could even venture to say that the future belongs to the American Indian. That might sound a bit grandiose and perhaps ethnocentric, but it emerges from Native cultural perspectives and underscores the relevance of Native knowledge and experience in the world today. In order to survive, the world will have to arrive at many of the same principles, values and social life-ways of Native cultures, which will produce a more balanced way of living for the future.

On Dec. 1, 2002, I spoke with Chickasaw astronaut John Herrington while he was circling the globe in the space shuttle Endeavour. I was at the end of a phone line in a log cabin on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, Canada, and Commander Herrington was hundreds of miles above the Earth, at that moment hurtling over the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America.

Prior to Herrington’s historic odyssey, I sat with editors at Indian Country Today to determine the questions we would ask him during the in-flight interview NASA had granted the newspaper.  Mission Control allowed only enough time for about six questions. Access to the communications feed was narrow, given the speed of the Endeavour. In addition, several news agencies were bundled up in a queue. As a result, we put a good deal of thought into the questions we would ask.

We considered technical questions concerning Herrington’s responsibilities for construction on the space station and the hazardous business of space walking, and what it meant to him to become the loftiest of all Indian steelworkers.  We considered questions about his example as a role model to thousands of Indian children who were tracking his voyage from schools across the hemisphere. We considered, and eventually asked, a question about NASA’s prohibition of his bringing along tobacco, which is used in ceremonies by many Native peoples. But, ultimately, we decided the first question needed to address the philosophical or spiritual nature of the experience.

“Commander Herrington,” I said, “please describe as best you can what you are seeing and feeling as you look down upon our Mother Earth from the Skyworld.”

With characteristic humility and eloquence, traits which have endeared him to the American public, Herrington spoke of humans finding themselves living on a remarkable life-giving planet set in the midst of the vastness of the universe.

He spoke of the grandeur of the Earth and observed how thin the atmosphere appeared by comparison. He reflected upon how minor human beings seemed in the larger scope of things. And he talked, clearly with awe, about his realization of the “grand scheme” of our living earth. He spoke as one of the relative few to ever occupy such a remarkable vantage point.

Our conversation was emblematic of the distance Indian peoples had traveled, both figuratively and literally, in our related struggles to keep our ongoing stories alive. For the newspaper, connecting to outer space from a log cabin on Indian Territory was intentional. Its purpose was to reveal the powerful adherence Native peoples have to place, to our lands of the Western Hemisphere, and to symbolically express the numerous cultural entreaties made from our lands, over millennia, to the great unknown.

Herrington’s reverence at the vision that appeared before him, combined with his inclination to appreciate its complexity, was not dissimilar to the fundamental propositions that serve as a foundation to American Indian cultural inquiry, to Indian thinking.

Let us all strive to fly as high as Commander Herrington, with dignity and purpose, toward educational enlightenment.

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Tim Johnson, who is Mohawk, is associate director for museum programs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. The American Indian News Service is an outreach of the National Museum of the American Indian. All content is free to publish or post. Email the editor at editor@americanindiannews.org. Visit the American Indian News Service at www.americanindiannews.org.

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Courtesy of Irving Nelson - Children attend the summer reading program at the Navajo Nation Library.

He’s more likely to be discovered among the bookshelves, where he recently finished a three-decades-long project: He personally catalogued his library’s 73,392 books.

“I won’t get to see all the people the library touches,” said Nelson, who is Navajo. “But we’re touching the lives of people out there.”

Nelson, 50, was one of two individuals recently honored with the Prism Award by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Given for the first time this year, the Prism Award recognizes unsung Native American heroes who serve their communities in innovative ways.

Hired in 1977 to drive the bookmobile, Nelson has built a formerly humble library of several hundred books into an eight-employee system encompassing a main library in Window Rock, Ariz., a branch library in nearby Kayenta and several mini-libraries across the Navajo reservation. Each day about 350 people visit the libraries, and not just for the books. Many come to use the free Internet. Some do homework or look for jobs, others email friends and family in the military. Some search archival records, which include Navajo land-claim documents dating back to 1675.

Many tribes established libraries in the mid-1970s after the National Indian Education Association released a series of pamphlets about how to start them.

“Now tribal libraries truly run the gamut,” said Liana Juliano, president of the American Indian Library Association. “One library is in a house with bookshelves in the bathroom. Others are sophisticated libraries that function like a public library anywhere with storytelling times and computer access.”

But the majority share a tradition of making the most of scarce resources, said Mary Villegas of the library development division of the Arizona State Library. “A lot of tribal libraries, I call them a library of one, providing all the services of a public library,” she said. “Tribal librarians are an amazing group of individuals; they have amazing camaraderie among them.”

The original library at Window Rock, capital of the Navajo Nation, was opened in 1941 by wives of Bureau of Indian Affairs employees. Located in the basement of the old BIA building, the library had asbestos-covered steam pipes running along its ceiling, and a heating system that didn’t always work when Nelson joined the staff in 1977.

Driving the bookmobile took Nelson to far-flung corners of his reservation, roughly equal in size to the state of West Virginia. He navigated rugged terrain and rutted roads to bring books to all of Navajo’s 110 chapters, each the size of a county.

The bookmobile went memorably kaput after two years. “The last time I drove the bookmobile, it broke down 90 miles out of Window Rock in January,” he said. “We walked back, two of us with one jacket between us. We just passed it back and forth.”

That was only the prelude to Nelson’s journey to bring books to the Navajo people. It would take him to cities on both the East and West Coast, where he picks up donated new books by the truckload and drives them back to the Navajo Nation—and not just to the library. The Navajo Book Project, which he ran until 2002, put more than one million new books into the hands of the reservation’s readers.

Herbert Long Sr., who once supervised the library, said Nelson has also worked to provide computers to chapter offices so people in remote areas can have Internet access.

“When I was growing up, there was really nothing here for kids,” Long said. “Up to at least the last year or so, even if you had a computer, you were pretty much limited to dial-up Internet service. Now he is increasing the access for people.”

Nelson’s resourcefulness has sustained the library for more than two decades. In his early days, he learned how to dry out books after a flood, spending months saving the collection. In recent years, he has worked with a company to digitize the leading newspaper on the reservation, the Navajo Times.

Nelson’s current challenge is how to share and perpetuate his life’s work through his staff and community, Long said. The lifelong reader, the man who has brought  a million books to his nation, is losing his sight to glaucoma.

But like the country veterinarian in James Herriot’s “All Things Great and Small,” his favorite series of novels (which he rereads every year), Nelson is simply heading into a new chapter.

And it’s not the books on the shelves or the catalogue of accomplishments that motivate him. It’s serving people who like to read.

“I don’t think that I am a leader,” Nelson said. “Anyone can do it. They just have to have fortitude and a lot of passion for their work.”

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By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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By R.A. Whiteside, National Museum of the American Indian Macklin Becenti, a 19-year-old Navajo, traveled to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian after winning the 2009 Student Artist Competition.

Becenti traveled from his home on the Navajo Reservation to Washington in late July to be honored at the Office of Indian Education and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

His winning lead pencil drawing, depicting a Navajo woman weaving at her loom while a child does schoolwork, is a subtle interpretation of the competition’s theme, “Tradition is my Life, Education is my Future.” To view all the winning entries, go to kids.indianeducation.org/file/2009_SAC_art_winners.pdf.

This year’s competition attracted entries from 604 students from 30 states and more than a dozen Indian nations. Entries were judged in age categories ranging from preschool through high school. Becenti, the winner in the 11th- and 12th-grade category, received the additional honor of being named an Emerging High School Artist by the museum and receiving a trip to Washington.

It is “an opportunity of self-discovery and to gain new personal experiences that can only add to personal growth and greater self-confidence that is often needed by young adults,” said Keevin Lewis, Navajo, a programs coordinator at the National Museum of the American Indian.

Becenti and his mother, Velma Toddy, live in Pine Springs, a community on the south end of the Navajo Reservation where the 19-year-old said he is related to everyone. Living seven miles from Houck, Ariz., and a 90-minute bus ride from school, Becenti draws, weaves, sculpts, sews moccasins and makes silver jewelry. He credits his grandmother, who makes baskets and pottery; a great aunt who weaves; and his uncles, who work in many traditional Navajo arts, with inspiring his artistry.

“When I was small, my uncles who were artists told me I was OK,” Becenti said.

After learning of the contest, Toddy said her son stayed up two nights sketching his entry. She told him, “I know you are going to win. I know it. When he brought back the message that he won, I said, ‘I told you so.’”

Of the drawing, Becenti explained, “I was thinking about education, and a little child growing up around her grandmother or in her tradition. She just got back from school and is doing her work while her grandmother weaves.”

Becenti specializes in portraiture, a skill he developed drawing from photographs. He hopes to study video production in college.

His illustration is included in a traveling art exhibition of all the winning entries. It opened at the U.S. Department of Education on July 21, and will also be shown at the National Museum of the American Indian and the Oklahoma City History Center.

Indian nations represented among the children who won include Northern Paiute, Sault Ste. Marie Tribes of Chippewa Indians, Cherokee, Gila River Indian Community, Mississippi Band of Choctaw, Hopi, Seminole Tribe, United Houma Nation, Oneida Indian Nation, San Carlos Apache, White Mountain Apache and Ponca Tribe.

By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service