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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By Katherine Fogden. New tastes are part of the "Power of Chocolate," a festival, which will be celebrated at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian on Feb. 13-14.

Mayans transplanted the cacao tree from the rainforest to their villages and fermented, dried and roasted its seeds to concoct a decidedly unsweet drink involving chilies and lots of froth.

The Aztec were drinking the bitter brew when the Spanish Conquistadors arrived in the 1520s. Although the Spaniards didn’t like the beverage, they hauled the cacao seeds back to Europe. A century later, when someone thought to add sugar—a luxury the ancient Mayans didn’t have—this indigenous American flavor became a lasting worldwide sensation.

Native ties to making chocolate continue into the 21^st century via Bedré Fine Chocolates, a company the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma bought in 2000. Bedré, sold in Neiman Marcus and Bloomingdale’s department stores, is particularly proud to provide the guitar-shaped chocolates to three of the Seminole Nation’s Hard Rock© hotels. Guests find the delicious products of the only Native American-owned chocolate company in the United States on their pillows.

At the Smithsonian’s Mitsitam Cafe, Hetzler likes to cook chocolate the old-school way, though with a twist. His Mexican hot chocolate is both sweet and spiced with pasilla peppers. And the Mitsitam’s Chocolate and Coconut Soup draws out the chocolate’s distinctive flavor with coconut milk, onions and pasilla negro chile peppers.

Hetzler will demonstrate cooking with chocolate during the museum’s “Power of Chocolate” festival on Feb. 13-14. The festival will travel back to the roots of chocolate with Bolivian cacao farmers and presentations about the history, mythology and art surrounding its origins.

Mitsitam Cafe shares the flavor, originally sipped with chilies by the Mayans, with two quick, tasty recipes.

The Mitsitam Cafe’s Chocolate and Coconut Soup, garnished with cocoa-dusted plantains

Serves 3-4

• 1 medium white onion, diced
• 2 medium shallots, diced
• 3 dried pasilla negro chile peppers
• 2 cups half-and-half
• 2 cups heavy cream
• 1 14-oz. can of coconut milk
• 8 oz. bittersweet chocolate (74 percent)

For garnish:

• 1 green plantain
• ¼ cup cocoa powder
• ¼ cup sugar

To prepare:

For the soup, sauté onions, shallots and the dried chiles until translucent. Add cream and half-and-half; bring to a boil. Remove from heat and add chocolate. Whisk until blended. Add coconut milk. Puree in blender. Season lightly with salt.

For garnish, peel a green plantain and slice fruit into thin discs. Lightly deep fry until crispy. Stir together cocoa and sugar, and use the mixture to lightly coat the fried plantain chips. Scatter the cocoa-coated chips atop each serving of soup.

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By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

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Courtesy Penny Gamble Williams and Thunder Williams - click photo for full resolution version

The former Sunksqua or female sachem of the Chappaquiddick Band of the Wampanoag Nation of Massachusetts shared the experiences with the American Indian News Service in an interview about the upcoming exhibition “IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas.” She and her husband, Thunder Williams, lead the Ohke Cultural Network Inc. which submitted the proposal for the exhibition to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

“I have been an activist in movements—AIM, Women of All Red Nations and others. At a meeting of the Black Panthers in the 1970s, they told me that I had to choose. “You are either black or Indian, you can’t be both.’ I made my choice.”

The experience reminded Gamble-Williams of the time her fifth-grade teacher walked up to her desk after reading an essay about her summer vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. Squeezing the young Gamble-Williams’ shoulder, the teacher said, “It’s not nice to make up stories. Everyone knows the New England Indians are dead.”

Gamble-Williams, who is descended from African American and Alabama Creek on her father’s side and African American and Chappaquiddick/Wampanoag on her mother’s, is a visual storyteller and cultural presenter. She serves as spiritual leader of the Chappaquiddick Band of the Wampanoag Nation of Massachusetts (www.chappaquiddick-wampanoag.org).

Thunder Williams, whose lineage is Carib Indian, African and European, emigrated from Trinidad and Tobago at age 5.

Both have been active in the African American, Native American and Afro-Caribbean communities. For the past decade, they’ve hosted The Talking Feather Radio Show on Radio One WOL 1450 AM in Washington, D.C. It is also broadcast on Blog Talk Radio at www.blogtalkradio.com/talkingfeather.
They joined American Indian News Service Editor Kara Briggs for an interview recently.

Kara Briggs: Why is the IndiVisible exhibition important for America?

Penny Gamble-Williams: This exhibition, IndiVisible, is valuable because it helps all people formulate another way of looking at the history of this country. We cannot obfuscate the facts of American history, deny that genocidal practices nearly wiped out an entire race of people or refuse to acknowledge that two richly diverse indigenous civilizations, the African and Native, mightily contributed to the wealth and prosperity of the Americas.

Thunder Williams: African-Americans and Native peoples stood together in the cotton and tobacco fields. We were often literally chained together. We were bonded through the tyranny of oppression and colonization. We intermixed and intermarried on the Underground Railroad, the forced removals across Turtle Island and the resistance in maroon colonies.
All these experiences give us a rich shared heritage.

Kara Briggs: Penny, you grew up in Providence, R.I., not far from Chappaquiddick and the island homelands of the Wampanoag. You were saying that the tribe was a whaling tribe originally?

Penny Gamble-Williams: Chappaquiddick men were whalers historically, and after colonization they had to go out on the whaling ships to make a living. Whaling was one of the toughest jobs during that time and because the men were out to sea for long periods of time, sometimes years, it took a toll on the elders, women and children. Some of the men never returned home, either, because of death or settling in other parts of the world.

Thunder Williams: As the Native men went out to sea, African American and other foreign men who worked in the surrounding areas of the islands intermarried and became part of the tribal community.

Penny Gamble-Williams: My great-great-great aunt, Sarah Brown, who was Chappaquiddick, married a black whaling captain, William A. Martin. His great-grandmother had been enslaved on Martha’s Vineyard Island and was owned by the Bassett family. When I was Sunksqua of the Chappaquiddick from 1995 to 2002, Thunder and I traveled to London and conducted research in the British Museum, the Guildhall Library, Oxford and the Maritime Museum. It was amazing to see documents that related specifically to the Chappaquiddick and other Wampanoag Bands of Massachusetts, as well as Narragansett and Pequot.

Kara Briggs: What did you learn personally through that research?

Penny Gamble-Williams: Most of the European American whaling captains were well off and had stately homes in Edgartown. William and Sarah lived in a humble home that he built on Chappaquiddick. The house still stands and is privately owned. It needs major repair. There is no plaque showing the history of this black whaling captain. He and Sarah were married for 50 years. (Editor’s note: As this issue went into production the New York Times published an article about the current owner of William A. Martin’s house putting it up for sale.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/us/04chappaquiddick.html.)

Kara Briggs: Three generations before you, your relatives lived on the Chappaquiddick Reservation, were allotted land and owned houses. But in your childhood Chappaquiddick was anything but home.

Penny Gamble-Williams: I heard the stories and spent time with the elders of my family. I enjoyed every summer until I was 16 years old on Martha’s Vineyard in Oak Bluffs on Wamsutta Avenue. On some occasions we’d get in my uncle’s convertible and take a trip to Chappaquiddick. That’s where my mother would talk about the land and family. I’d say, ‘Why can’t we get out and walk around?’ My mother never wanted to.

Thunder Williams: Even now when you talk about the Chappaquiddick Indians, the current residents on Chappaquiddick Island, who are 99.9 percent European, seem threatened or guilt-ridden or noticeably indifferent.

Kara Briggs: In reconstituting your nation and reclaiming nation’s ties to Chappaquiddick Island, you faced court battles with residents even to have access to that burial ground. They were claiming that you weren’t Wampanoag.

Penny Gamble-Williams: Every Chappaquiddick family had title to the land that had been allotted in the 1800s. Most had to move from the island in order to make a living. My family moved to Nantucket, New Bedford and Providence. The ties were never broken. When I grew up I had my map with lots of information about family land on the reservation.

Kara Briggs: You and your family have been culturally active for decades. There are Chappaquiddick/ Wampanoag burial grounds on the island that have become gathering places for your people. But there was resistance to your reclaiming those places.

Penny Gamble-Williams: On occasion when my family got letters from attorneys representing parties who owned land in common with us, they would ask me, ‘Why are you trying to hold onto this land when you are not even Indian?’ They felt that because I didn’t grow up on Chappaquiddick I knew nothing about the land or the culture. They were wrong. Because of all these experiences we decided to have ceremonies on Chappaquiddick at one of the burial grounds where many of our relatives had been buried.

Thunder Williams: It’s normal for Europeans to visit their burial grounds, but if Native people want to pay homage to their ancestor and do ceremonies in their spiritual tradition they seem not to understand. They seem not to understand our deep-rooted spiritual bonding to Mother Earth and the healing nature of walking on the land, not selling it and not building trophy houses on it.

– By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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By Joelle ClarkNorthern Arizona University Irvin Poleahla, who is Hopi, films at Spruce Tree House in Mesa Verde National Park, Colo., during a day with Footprints of the Ancestors, a six-year project to deepen cultural knowledge among Hopi youth. The Northern Arizona University program brought high-school-age students together with Hopi elders at archaeological sites.

The group, which included staff from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, visited the museum’s Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Md., where they viewed ancient Hopi cultural items. They met with curators and other staff to confer about the 16 students’ ideas for creating their own exhibition about Hopi culture.

Joelle Clark, of Northern Arizona University, said many of the students brought some part of their traditional dress to the museum and sang a Hopi song for the staff. The group was able to view the museum’s collection of Hopi objects including woven clothing several hundred years old, which most had not seen before.

The museum staff hosted a potluck to welcome them. “They brought this incredible feast,” said Clark, who coordinates professional development projects in the anthropology department. “Everything was special. I think that’s something that Native people don’t expect when they visit a museum.”

By George GumermanNorthern Arizona UniversityAs part of the Footprints of the Ancestors program, Hopi students came to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian to see artifacts and enjoy a potluck with staff.

The trip, which also brought the Hopi visitors to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., is the culmination of a six-year project to promote Hopi culture among youth. Students will develop multimedia exhibitions in the coming months based on what they’ve learned.

Over the past several years, the program, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, brought the students to Hopi archaeological sites, where elders shared history with them. Teachers developed curriculum and students learned about the footprints of their ancestors, as the Hopi call the archaeological sites and related oral history.

The program was developed in collaboration between Northern Arizona University and the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office. Dr. George Gumerman IV, an anthropology professor at the university, said the program has deeply affected the teens involved.

“One mother became very emotional when sharing just how much these experiences have influenced her daughter,” Gumerman said. “With tears in her eyes, the mother exclaimed how our summer journeys to their ancestral sites have changed her daughter’s life.”

The National Museum of the American Indian welcomes tribal groups to visit the Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Md. Appointments to view artifacts in the museum’s storage facility should be made two or three months in advance. To make an appointment, call Pat Nietfeld at (301) 238-1454 or fax at (301) 238-3210 or email at nmaicollections@si.edu.

–By Kara Briggs