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 Smithsonian National Postal Museum Hollow Horn Bear, who fought in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, was featured in the first 14-cent stamp issued by the U.S. Postal Service in 1923.

The modest scale of this art—usually less than 2 square inches—is no barrier to the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, which has launched an online exhibition, “The American Indian in Stamps: Profiles in Leadership, Accomplishment and Cultural Celebration.” And for the first time the National Postal Museum turned to another museum, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, for help in adding history and cultural context to one of its exhibitions.

“We have about six million objects and a small space so we can’t display most of them,” said Thomas Lera, who is the Winton M. Blount Research Chair at the National Postal Museum. “That’s why we have decided to digitize our collection. It’s a great tool for people, like kids who want to do a report. They can go on the website. It’s American history in the mail.”

“The American Indian in Stamps” can only be viewed at www.postalmuseum.si.edu/ARAGOAmericanIndian. It features colorful images of 40 of the approximately 70 stamps that the U.S. Postal Service has issued featuring Native Americans since 1875. The site also features many other exhibitions on other themes. The technology of the museum’s website enables viewers to magnify images to almost the size of their computer screen—allowing the artistry of the stamps to be seen in even more detail than a magnifying glass could provide.

Other facts, including the artist who designed the stamp and the medium in which the art was created, are a click away. The collaboration between the two museums, with contributions from the Library of Congress, expands viewers’ understanding of both familiar recent postage and less-familiar stamps dating back to the late 19th century.

“We took a celebratory approach,” said José Barreiro, of the Taino Nation, assistant director for research at the National Museum of the American Indian, “and helped define some concepts of diplomacy and leadership.”

A 1980 stamp featuring Sequoyah, the Cherokee man who completed a ground-breaking syllabary of his native language in 1821, is based on a 1965 portrait. Accompanying the stamp in the exhibition is a photo of the cover of a 1975 publication of the English-Cherokee syllabary from the American Indian museum’s collection.

A 1968 stamp depicting Chief Joseph is based on a portrait painted from life by artist Cyrenius Hall in 1878, which resides in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. A modern art work of Chief Joseph’s picture in beads from the nearby National Museum of the American Indian is displayed with the stamp to show a different interpretation. It is titled “The Blue Face Bracelet” (2003) by Choctaw artist Marcus Amerman.

The evolution over time of national perceptions about American Indians and the technology of stamp-making are both evident in the online exhibit. An 1898 engraving of an Indian in horseback pursuit of a buffalo gives way in a century to the 1998 lithography stamp commemorating Olympian Jim Thorpe, of the Sac and Fox Nation, as one of the most significant figures of the 20th century.

Lera said stamps are typically issued for “the big historical moments. They’re an overview. It’s a crash course in history.”

Since 1958, the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee has consulted on about 100 new stamps released each year, providing the “breadth of judgment and depth of experience in various areas that influence subject matter, character and beauty of postage stamps,” according to the U.S. Postal Service.

For Native American subject matter, the committee shifted its focus starting in the 1990s to original artwork showing Native American themes, and photography of Native Americans’ art. Even when significant people are featured, they tend to be more educational in nature, Lera said. The 1998 Jim Thorpe stamp shows not only his face as a young man, but also an inset of him competing in the Olympic Games of 1912.

“The American Indian in Stamps,” debuted in November, and will be displayed indefinitely. It can also change as more research is done on existing material, and as the U.S. Postal Service issues new stamps, Lera said. – Kara Briggs

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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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

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