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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Photo by Mary McCarthy Mary G. Ross, at 96, joins the 2004 opening procession for the Smithsonian's new National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington, D.C

Because Ross, after a lifetime of high-flying achievement as one of the nation’s most prominent women scientists of the space age, wanted to wear her ancestral dress to the 2004 opening of the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of the American Indian.

In the past 12 months, the museum has received a bequest of more than $400,000 from Mary G. Ross, who died in April 2008, only three months shy of her 100th birthday

“She was a strong-willed, independent woman who was ahead of her time,” said her Oneida friend Norbert Hill, recent past chairman of the National Museum of the American Indian’s Board of Trustees, “and a proud woman who never forgot where she was from.”

Mary G. Ross—whose Cherokee lineage includes leaders and teachers and who herself now figures in that lineage as the Cherokee rocket scientist—spent her century of life looking mostly into the future.

Born in 1908 on her parents’ allotment in the foothills of the Ozarks, she was one year younger than the state of Oklahoma. It had been 70 years since her ancestor led his people over the Trail of Tears. She excelled in math, and her first career was as a young high school math and science teacher. By 1937, Ross remembered asking herself, “Are you going to go out and see anything of the world, or are you going to stay in Northern Oklahoma?”

She went to work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and, at age 29 in 1937, and later went to Santa Fe, N.M., as the girls’ adviser at a new school for American Indian artists. In the summers Ross pursued a master’s degree in mathematics at the University of Northern Colorado. While there, she took every astronomy class the school had, and read every book about the stars. The clear night sky in Colorado fascinated her.

She was hired by the Lockheed Corporation as a mathematician in 1942 and worked on improving the aeroelasticity of the P-38 Lightning fighter plane—the first to go more than 400 mph.

By 1948, Ross was on the ground floor of what would become the space race. In 1952 Lockheed asked her to be one of 40 engineers in what became known as the Lockheed Skunk Works, a super-secret think tank led by legendary aeronautics engineer Clarence “Kelly” Johnson. It was the start of Lockheed Missiles & Space Co., a major consultant to NASA based in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Ross was 45, the only woman and the only Native American. Most of the theories and papers that emerged from that Lockheed group, including those by Ross, are still classified.

Around the time of the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik, Ross moved into the public eye. In 1958 she appeared on the television show “What’s My Line?” It took contestants many guesses before they realized that the smiling woman in a V-necked, sleeveless black dress in fact, as the caption read, “Designs Rocket Missiles and Satellites (Lockheed Aircraft).”

One San Francisco-area newspaper article from 1961 called Ross “possibly the most influential Indian maid since Pocahontas,” and noted that she was “making her mark in outer space.” She told the interviewer, “I think of myself as applying mathematics in a fascinating field.”

Another article from the time noted that Ross, who had yet to see a rocket blast off, believed that women would make “wonderful astronauts.” But she said, “I’d rather stay down here and analyze the data.”

Ross retired from Lockheed at age 65 in 1973, and turned her attention to the next generation of Native Americans and women in engineering.

“To function efficiently, you need math,” she said later in life. “The world is so technical, if you plan to work in it, a math background will let you go farther and faster.”

One of the few regrets she ever mentioned was that she had spent so much of her life apart from Indian people.

At 96, Ross was looking ahead again—to the long-anticipated Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. In the opening procession, she stepped out of her electric wheelchair on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and walked for half a block.

“She felt she was a part of history being made, again,” said friend Norbert Hill.

By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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“The museum has been key to training a new generation of conservators and integrating Native ways of knowing and belief into conservation,” said Anna Strankman, curator of Native American art at the Portland (Ore.) Art Museum. “Questions get asked like, ‘How do you treat things? What is the best thing for the object?’ They’ve been at the forefront. I think that has had a lot of influence on a lot of museums.”

Since 1991, more than 130 conservation interns have spent from 10 weeks to two years honing skills under the leadership of Marian Kaminitz, the head of conservation at the National Museum of the American Indian.

The museum has some unique conservation challenges because it inherited its 800,000-item collection from the Museum of the American Indian headed by George Gustav Heye, a wealthy industrialist who began collecting American Indian objects in 1897. Heye spent his fortune amassing the largest collection of Native American objects in the world, but showed less care for documentation about the origin of pieces. In 1922, Heye established the Museum of the American Indian in New York City to display his collection.

His museum remained open until 1994, when the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian opened its doors in New York City.

Kaminitz was already at work at Heye’s Bronx storage facility, assessing the collection and preparing for its move to the museum’s state-of-the-art conservation facility, the Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Md., which opened in 1999. To view a video about the move, go to: www.AmericanIndian.si.edu/subpage.cfm?subpage=collections&second=collections&third=move#f

The interns come to the museum’s conservation department to work with Kaminitz and to obtain real-world experience working with the collection, which spans North and South America. Many say they have been personally affected by their experience. Three former 10-week interns, including Strankman, recently shared how their internships influenced their careers and lives.

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Anna Strankman Photo Courtesy of the Portland Art Museum

On the first day of Anna Strankman’s internship in 1996, Kaminitz sent her outside to watch conservation work on a totem pole. The totem from Old Kasaan, a village from Haida Gwaii in British Columbia, was standing on a street corner in the Bronx, outside the storage center of its former owner, the Museum of the American Indian in New York. At some point, the former curators had replaced decay with concrete.

It was no way to treat a totem. The famed Haida carver Jim Hart came from Vancouver, B.C., to advise about removing decay and carving replacement pieces out of wood.

“He basically taught me to use a crooked knife and carve cedar,” Strankman said.

They also removed concrete from the pole, one of many destructive measures taken by past curators in misguided efforts to preserve materials.

Over the year Strankman spent at the museum, its staff was getting the 800,000-item collection ready to move to the National Museum of the American Indian’s Cultural Resources Center outside Washington, D.C. Strankman was involved in inventorying and planning. “The storage was not ideal,” she said. “I remember emergency measures that had to be taken, especially in the wintertime.”

Strankman left before the move to undertake studies for her master’s in art history at the University of Washington. Her thesis catalogued the totem poles from Old Massett,  B.C.,  and traced their stories. Now, as curator of the Native American art collection at the Portland (Ore.) Art Museum, Strankman isn’t necessarily responsible for conservation, yet her experience at the national museum makes her mindful of how long organic materials are exposed to light and when she needs to rotate them off display for rest.

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Heather Whiteman Runs Him-Oleyte Photo courtesy of Heather Whiteman Runs Him-Oleyte

Heather Whiteman Runs Him-Oleyte, a Harvard-educated attorney, is the associate lead legal counsel for the Crow Tribe in Montana. But in 1995 she was a student at the Institute of American Indian Art and a conservation intern at the National Museum of the American Indian.

As an intern, she disassembled exhibitions from the George Gustav Heye Center in New York and packed them for moving to the national museum’s new Cultural Resources Center in Maryland. She made simple repairs on bandolier bags for an exhibition. But when she looks back at the experience, what she takes away is a feeling.

“It is a privilege to work with the things our ancestors created with so much care,” said Whiteman Runs Him-Oleyte, who is Crow. “It is a huge responsibility to contemplate how to ensure their survival for future generations, and to determine what actions or prohibitions constitute respect.”

At the museum, she contemplated pursuing a career in conservation. The heavy chemistry prerequisites were an obstacle, and she said she was “sidetracked” by law school. But in what she calls a roundabout way, her experience at the museum led her to the law.

“Working with art, with material culture of Native peoples on an intimate basis, one cannot help but to contemplate the history and the
circumstances that led individual artists and craftspeople to make things the way they did,” she said. “It often made me think about what we, as tribal nations, are doing today, and the choices we have now.”

The exposure to the beautiful clothing, household items and horse gear in the museum’s collection continues to inspire Whiteman Runs Him-Oleyte 15 years after her internship. “That was a real gift to me as a traditional doll maker and artist,” she said.

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Tharron Bloomfield, who was an intern at the National Museum of the American Indian in 2001, is one of a growing generation of indigenous curators and librarians—in New Zealand and Australia.

“I chose to be a conservator because there weren’t many Maori doing it, so I saw a gap,” said Bloomfield, who is Maori from the Ngati Porou tribe in New Zealand. “And I like the hands-on aspect of conservation and the close relationship you build with objects.”

As a “summer” intern in 2001 (interviewed by email, he wrote summer in quotation marks because the internship was during New Zealand’s winter), he worked preparing objects for the 2004 opening of the museum in Washington. Bloomfield is now a conservator at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in Darwin, Australia, where the large indigenous population is reflected in the collection’s many beautiful Aboriginal pieces—contemporary and traditional.

He was impressed during his 10-week internship by the diversity of material, “and, therefore, the Native people of the whole Western Hemisphere and objects made from such a variety of materials,” he said.

But where the National Museum of the American Indian most influenced him was in its relationship-building with tribal culture bearers.

“I would say working at the museum reinforced things for me in terms of working with indigenous peoples and material,” Bloomfield said. “Things such as treating objects with respect and acknowledging their feelings, and the need for proper consultation and relationships with traditional owners.”

As his professional training spanned hemispheres, so Bloomfield’s interest in indigenous arts stretches from traditional arts made of natural materials to contemporary expression in new digital and video media.

“We are not just ancient cultures who stopped existing when we were colonized,” Bloomfield said. “We are around and here now, contributing to the 21st century.”

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Randy'L He-dow Teton Photo by Moz Studios

Randy’L He-dow Teton, the Shoshone-Bannock/Cree woman best known as the model for the Sacagawea coin, was a conservation intern at the National Museum of the American Indian in 1997.

“I have a passion for ethnographic conservation,” she said, “doing small mending, doing photography, giving tips about how to take care of family heirlooms at home.”

At the time of her internship, Teton was a student at the Institute of American Indian Art. She met a freelance artist while at IAIA and posed for pictures in which she portrayed Sacagawea. She didn’t know what it was for, but later heard from the U.S. Mint that her face would be on the coin. Teton is the youngest and only living person on a U.S. coin.

By the time she completed her bachelor’s degree in art history from Fort Lewis College in Colorado, Teton had fallen in love, and her life would take a different path.

Now she and her young family live at the Shoshone-Bannock reservation in southeastern Idaho, and Teton works for a nonprofit organization, Partners for Prosperity, which does workforce training. But she’d like to use her experience in museum collections again, maybe as an appraiser on the PBS program “Antiques Roadshow.”

Teton believes that she carries the values of the museum into her community in ways other than working in a museum. “I am active in going to our cultural meetings,” she said. “I work with artists and craft vendors, looking for a model to make sure our artists are protected from pawn shops.”

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By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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Courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian A Walla Walla bag, made about 1915 of seed beads, wool, canvas, hide and cotton thread, is on display in "A Song for the Horse Nation" at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in New York City.

The exhibition celebrates the relationship between American Indians and horses, featuring 98 elaborate examples that include horse trappings, objects with horse motifs and new works specially commissioned for the show. Originally indigenous to the Americas, the horse had become extinct before being reintroduced to the Western Hemisphere by way of European ships in the 15^th century. The exhibition revolves around the return of what some Native peoples call the Horse Nation, a great ally to the Native nations.

“Even though the pinnacle of the horse lasted only a century, this exhibition details how Native people rapidly integrated the horse into their lifeways, quickly becoming among the best mounted soldiers in the world,” said National Museum of the American Indian Director Kevin Gover, who is Pawnee.

The online exhibition, www.AmericanIndian.si.edu/exhibitions/horsenation, shares the script with the actual one, offering photos of many objects on display at the museum. Web viewers who live far away from the museums in Washington, D.C., and New York get a chance to share the experience in real time thanks to the online version’s simultaneous launch.

“It’s a comprehensive representation of the gallery exhibition that will grow in time to include additional educational resources and incorporate more interactive elements that might not be possible in the physical exhibition,” said Jason Wigfield, a web developer for the museum. “It’s a good opportunity for people, who, geographically speaking, may not be able to make it to the museum. And in addition to that, it’s accessible anytime and for long after the exhibition closes.

“This online exhibition is a great resource for teachers, parents, and anyone interested in exploring this topic.”

Interactive features, such as the opportunity to hear the word for “horse” in several Native languages through the computer, are a natural on the Web. Both the online exhibition and the one in New York provide recordings for the following languages: in Assiniboine, thongatch-shonga or sho-a-thin-ga (“big dog”); in A’aninin (Gros Ventre), it-shuma-shunga (“red dog”); in Lakota, Sunkakhan (“holy dog” or “mystery dog”); in Siksika of the Blackfoot, ponoka-mita (“elk dog”); in Cree, mistatim (“big dog”).

The exhibition uses video, images and commissioned artwork to carry the story of American Indians’ relationship with the horse into contemporary times.

“A Song for the Horse Nation” will be on view at the museum in New York until July 7, 2011. It is scheduled to reopen at the museum in Washington, D.C., in October 2011 and run through January 2013, followed by a national tour.

If you can’t wait for a chance to see it in person, visit www.AmericanIndian.si.edu/exhibitions/horsenation to view it from home or classroom.

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By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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Credit Rochester Institute of Technology Big Shot. The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian lit on the exterior by more than 800 people holding flashlights and other light sources. Click photo for full resolution version.

The husband and wife team of Bill DuBois and Dawn Tower DuBois,  the photographers from the Rochester (N.Y.) Institute of Technology, perched atop 15 feet of scaffolding to take aim at the five-year-old museum building. Interior lights burned and rain glistened on the plaza. The Washington Monument loomed in the distance.

Every year, the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Big Shot project photographs a landmark building or location using hundreds of carefully aimed flashlights and camera flash units to create a magical image. The resulting photo is often called a “painting with light” because the institute’s photographers shoot a single extended exposure of 20-30 seconds.

Since 1987, photographs have included the U.S.S. Intrepid, the Royal Palace in Stockholm and the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, N.Y. View past Big Shot photographs at www.rit.edu/bigshot

Bill Destler, Rochester Institute of Technology’s president, declared the museum’s flagship building on the National Mall to be a “national landmark.”

Jason Younker, who is Coquille and assistant to the institute’s provost for Native American relations, stood with museum Director Kevin Gover in front of the building to provide perspective.

“We’re two shadows standing up front,” Younker said. “When I returned home, I showed my daughters the photo. I think it turned out fantastic.”

– American Indian News Service

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Credit Rochester Institute of Technology Big Shot. Click photo for full resolution version.

“He was wrong,” Senator Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii) told 400 people gathered earlier this month at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian 20^th Anniversary Gala.  “Indian tribes are flourishing.”

The black-tie gala in the museum’s Potomac Atrium raised over $450,000 for museum programs, and featured the Arizona California Territorial Bird Singers, the Metis Fiddler Quartet and Buffy Sainte-Marie. Classic rock band InKompliant of Temecula, Calif., rounded out the festivities. Speakers, including Director Kevin Gover, reflected on how unlikely a museum like this one seemed in the 1980s.

“Within the lifetimes of many of us here, the official policy of the United States was the termination of American Indian tribal existence,” said Gover, who took over the museum leadership in December 2007. “And yet, here we sit, in a great institutional center of living Native cultures, just a stone’s throw from the capitol of a mighty nation.”

Inouye and former Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Northern Cheyenne, were honored for their role in the founding of the museum, sponsoring legislation that established it on Nov. 28, 1989. The Oct. 7 gala also marked the fifth anniversary of the museum on the National Mall, the 10^th anniversary of the Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Md., and the 15^th anniversary of the museum in New York.

Campbell recalled Inouye saying, “‘Washington is a city of monuments, but there is not one for American Indians.’ From the beginning we wanted it to be a living,  breathing place.”

On Sept. 21, 2004, when the museum on the National Mall opened, Campbell remembers being so elated that he danced to the music from a powwow drum on the museum’s plaza.

More than 25,000 Native people marched on the National Mall that day to mark the opening of a museum that would tell the real stories of indigenous America. Richard Kurin, the Smithsonian Under Secretary for History, Art and Culture, recalled the people walking “hand in hand, in regal procession, whether on cell phones or in wheelchairs, with eagles flying overhead.”

It was a long journey to opening from 1989. Kurin told the celebrants that it was clear from the beginning, “No Quonset hut would do for the collection.”

The world-class collection acquired from the Museum of the American Indian in New York, included 800,000 objects acquired a century earlier by collector George Gustav Heye. The 18th Smithsonian museum would need to be a showcase of American Indian design, and a landmark 400 yards from the U.S. Capitol, a state-of-the-art collections center in Maryland and a museum in the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House in New York.

Starting in 1989, founding museum director W. Richard West, Jr., Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho, traveled Indian Country speaking about the vision for this museum which would be like no other.

“I remember listening to Rick in the early 1990s when I was president at Haskell Indian Nations University, and it was hard to imagine what he was talking about,” said Robert Martin, who is Cherokee and the current president of the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe. “To see this manifested is a striking tribute to our people.”

The development of the museums took many throughout Indian Country. In attitude, the effort displayed an intellectual resistance to the way Indians have historically been portrayed in America and instead demanded respect.

“This museum was not built only by architects, workers and donors,” Gover said. “It was also built by Native thinkers, Native culture-bearers, and Native artists.”

If the museum’s anniversaries are a milestone, they are also the foundation, he said, for a museum—which like its sibling museums in the Smithsonian Institution—will stand indefinitely in the heart of the nation. The museum’s work is “no less than to change what the world knows about Native peoples of the Americas and Hawaii.”

“We do all this out of a belief that the ancient wisdom of Native peoples, as expressed in contemporary lives,” Gover said, “holds promise not only for continuing the recovery of the tribal nations, but for meeting the challenges facing all of humanity.”

– By Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service

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Gunnison, a Mellon fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, is studying how to protect and preserve the plastics used in a large mobile that the museum plans to install this fall titled “Crux (as seen from those who sleep on the surface of the earth under the night sky)” by artist Brian Jungen of the Dunne-za Nation near Vancouver, B.C.

To view some of Jungen’s works, including “Crux,” go tohttp://www.catrionajeffries.com/b_b_jungen_work_55.html.

Courtesy Anne Gunnison Conservation intern Anne Gunnison holds open the mouth of a green, plastic crocodile from a new work in the National Museum of the American Indian’s collection.

“It’s very colorful,” said Gunnison, who is 29 and from Sacramento, Calif. “He uses a lot of different colors of luggage to make figures. By starting now, we can take steps to conserve the piece upfront.”

A recent graduate with a master’s degree from University College of London’s Institute of Archaeology, Gunnison’s research will be in the growing field of conserving plastics.

A million dollar grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation currently funds conservation fellowships and internships.The museum strategically intends these internships to foster a new generation of professionals adept in the innovative ways in which the museum involves Native peoples in the care of materials.

“We introduce them to our methodology so they learn about collaboration with the people who created these objects,” said Gina Ward, development officer at the National Museum of the American Indian. “We put culture and collaboration on an equal footing with science.”

In 2007 the Mellon Foundation pledged $1.5 million toward an endowment for Advanced Training in Conservation at the museum with the understanding the museum would raise another $3.5 million. To date, the museum has raised all but $500,000 toward this goal.

The Mellon fellows have hailed from museums in London, Vienna and Auckland. They have worked in museums such as the Guggenheim, the Chicago Institute of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mellon Foundation donations to other museums are used to fund conservation, develop departments and other works. It is unusual for the foundation’s contribution to be used for a training fellowship program, said Marian Kaminitz, the head of conservation at the museum.

Like Gunnison, most leave with a unique specialization after being assigned to an exhibition and being responsible for working with the related indigenous community.

Brian Jungen is a celebrated young sculptor whose work from such materials as deconstructed Nikes and luggage has won international acclaim. He has shown in such events as the Biennale in Sydney, Australia. To see that exhibition go to www.bos2008.com/app/biennale/artist/39. This summer he is working with Gunnison, talking through long-term questions such as how much change is acceptable for his plastic.

Highly flammable collodion and celluloid plastics began appearing in the 1800s. By the 1920s, plastic was everywhere. Over time, older plastics have decayed, cracking and fading, and sometimes damaging other objects next to them. Now conservationists are taking a proactive approach to caring for contemporary plastics.

“Plastics conservation is a growing field,” Gunnison said.

She hopes that planning, including perhaps making changes to the environment around the plastic art, will keep Jungen’s mobile from ever needing large-scale repair.

Maybe the Mellon fellowship works in somewhat the same way, Kaminitz said.

“By training conservators at the start of their careers, the museum can encourage respect for indigenous communities around the world,” she said. “Through the Mellon Fellowship program, we introduce conservators to this methodology and encourage them to fit this approach into their professional work in the future.”

By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

Washington, D.C.—On Sept. 21, 2004, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian opened with events that attracted over 80,000 Native and non-Native participants and witnesses.

During that week five years ago 100,000 visitors entered the museum’s doors.

As both the fifth anniversary for the museum in Washington and the twentieth anniversary of the legislation that established the museum approaches, the museum is hoping that everyone—even those who can’t come to Washington—will join in the celebration.

So the museum proposes that people hold potlucks to raise awareness and funds in support of museum programs. The target date for the potlucks is November 28th, which is National Native American Heritage Day.

In 2009, the museum marks not only the fifth anniversary of the stunning structure in Washington, and also the 20th anniversary of the legislation that established the museum; but also the 15th anniversary of the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian in lower Manhattan; and the 10th anniversary of the Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Md.

“The idea of the virtual potluck grew out of a lively discussion with the museum’s board of trustees last fall,” said Maggie Bertin, associate director for the museum’s office of museum resources. “We were discussing organizing the anniversary gala in Washington, D.C., and I asked our board how we might better engage our members and friends in Indian Country who could not join us physically in Washington at the gala.”

Lucille Echohawk, who is Pawnee and a trustee, suggested that the museum could host a nationwide fundraiser the way some organizations like the American Red Cross do, bringing fundraising to the local level, in homes and community centers across the country.

Museum staff expanded the idea by developing a website which will debut in September and allow people to create their own virtual potluck webpage. From there, people will be able to express what the museum means to them, and even email family and friends inviting them to attend their potluck and make a donation.

Or people could hold parties in their homes, their offices, their tribal centers, their churches or their classrooms.

“We want people to be creative,” said Inger de Montecinos, the museum’s membership program coordinator. “The point of it is to bring the National Museum of the American Indian community out everywhere so people can gather together and celebrate the anniversaries.”

Watch for details in the American Indian News Service or at the museum’s website,www.AmericanIndian.si.edu.

By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service