American Indian Heritage Month
By: Nancy | November 13, 2008 | Category: Home and Family
With curved walls of golden limestone and gardens filled with wetlands, boulders and crops like corn and squash, the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian doesn't look like all the other marble monuments and museums that surround it in Washington, DC. And in celebration of American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month, I thought I'd take a peek to see if the inside was as intriguing as the outside.
Eight hundred thousand. That's how many artifacts the museum holds—beaded jewelry and clothing, tools and toys, exhibits on hunting and housing, celebrations and tribal nations. Daily special events like storytelling, dance exhibitions, drama and films add to a visitor's understanding of Native American life.
This museum isn't the only place you can learn about the life of, and government services for, Native Americans though:
- USA.gov has a special section that covers cultural information, education, employment, small business issues and more for Native Americans and tribes.
- The Bureau of Indian Affairs manages lands held in trust for and the education of Native American families.
- The Indian Health Service focuses on life and medical issues that affect the Native American and Alaska Native communities.
- The National Park Service's National American Indian Heritage Month page links to information about places you can visit that are important to Native American history.
- The Department of Housing and Urban Development's CodeTalk site provides information on housing and other topics important to Native Americans.
Back at the museum, I head toward the Mitsitam Cafe (that's Delaware and Piscataway for "Let's Eat!" ) This is a unique museum cafeteria; the food here represents the indigenous cuisines of the Americas. I stand back as a gaggle of blue-blazered school boys charge the "Great Plains" food line for buffalo burgers. I find what I’m looking for at the "South America" food station: a quick snack of chicken tamal and blue cornbread before continuing my tour.
More than the beautiful and functional handcrafted items on display all around me, I think what fascinates me most are the video monitors throughout the museum playing interviews with members of different Native American communities, sharing stories of their tribal and family histories and how those experiences were sometimes at odds, and sometimes interwoven with the common American experience.
As I look around at my fellow museum goers, not counting those school kids, one in three of us seem to be of Native American descent. While my own blood runs Scottish and German, I yearn for but don't have strong ancestral ties. I watch the Cherokee, Navajo and Sioux visitors around me, studying the exhibits marking their ancestors' lives. And I wonder what it's like for them, as part of a community that knows so well its past, to see their histories—the proud and the painful—in those exhibits and videos.
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