How do Native Americans make peace with a national holiday that romanticizes the 1621 encounter between their ancestors and English settlers, and erases the deadly conflicts that followed?
Everything people need to know to join the National Museum of the American Indian in celebrating the diversity and contributions of Native Americans and Alaska Natives during Native American Heritage Month this November. For friends unable to visit Washington, D.C., or New York, the museum is webcasting many of these public programs live, then archiving them online.
A 20-second time-lapse video captures a couple of hours of work on a cut-paper piece by artist Ian Kuali’i (Native Hawaiian and Mescalero Apache). Here, Kuali’i is cutting along the sketched the outline of a portrait, though he also cuts freehand. (We asked he ever uses a projected image as a cutting guide. He doesn’t and offers the advice, “Simplify!”) Kuali'i, the 2019 Ronald and Susan Dubin Native Artist Fellow at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, is demonstrating his art and talking with visitors tomorrow, October 19, 2019, at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City.
Sgt. Woodrow Wilson Roach (Cherokee, 1912–1984) served with the Fifth Army during the Italian Campaign, the longest continuous combat and some of the fiercest fighting of World War II. Here, his granddaughter tells the museum about his life and the Cherokee language prayer card he carried as a soldier in Europe, then as a combat engineer in the Philippines. We're especially proud to share Sgt. Roach's story this weekend, during the groundbreaking for the National Native Veterans Memorial. The memorial—to be dedicated on November 11, 2020, on the grounds of the museum on the National Mall—honors the Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Alaska Native men and women who have served in the U.S. Armed Forces since the country was founded.
Suzan Shown Harjo has helped shape current ideas about cultural representation and respect. In Congress and the courts, she has advocated for reforms from the restoration of Native American religious freedoms to the protection of sacred lands. And she has held the Smithsonian and other museums to higher standards in working with Native people and their cultural patrimony. Friday, September 20, we honor her life and work at a symposium on the National Mall in Washington and live online.
This year, 80 Native delegates have been asked to take part in the official commemoration of D-Day. Their responsibilities include offering ceremonies at American cemeteries and memorials in Normandy to honor the men and women who served during World War II—part a growing movement to acknowledge the historic service of Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians in the U.S. Armed Forces.
"Winyan Wánakikśin" (Women Defenders of Others), a buffalo horn belt created by Lakota artists Kevin and Valerie Pourier, honors the strength and perseverance of women activists. Inspired by the Native women who took part in the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, the art work represents an important event in Native American, American, and environmental history, and speaks across artistic, cultural, and national boundaries.
The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts has unanimously accepted the most recent phase of design work for the National Native American Veterans Memorial. The commission praised the concept as “beautiful in its physical design and symbolism,” singling out the memorial’s layered meanings and the contemplative character of its setting within the museum's native landscape.
Negotiated in 1835 by a small group of Cherokee citizens without legal standing, challenged by the majority of the Cherokee nation and their elected government, the Treaty of New Echota was used by the United States to justify the removal of the Cherokee people along the Trail of Tears. Representatives of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes came together to see the treaty go on exhibit on the National Mall.
Designer Norma Baker–Flying Horse (enrolled citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation) grew up loving toy high heels and secondhand accessories. "I was the most stylish six-year-old on the cattle ranch," she says. This year, Paris Fashion Week featured her work. "To be a Native American designer showing for the Fashion Week Studio was amazing. I felt like a childhood dream had come true." Happy Women's History Month!
According to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Native American women are ten times more likely to be murdered and four times more likely to be sexually assaulted than the national average. Yet the issue has received little attention outside Indian Country. Artist Jaime Black (Métis) calls attention to the crisis through her installation "The REDress Project," on view in Washington throughout March. On March 21, she and other speakers will discuss ending violence against Native women at a symposium at the National Museum of the American Indian.
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Forty years ago, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act finally finally extended that right to the country's Native citizens. Here Native Americans who observe traditional ways talk about religious freedom.
Col. Wayne Don, a citizen of the Cupig and Yupik tribes, talks about his service in the Regular Army and the Alaska Army National Guard. Col. Don, who has been deployed to Bosnia, Afghanistan, and other overseas posts, is a member of the Advisory Committee helping to build the National Native American Veterans Memorial on the grounds of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
When the museum asked Native Americans if their families celebrate Thanksgiving, a friend from the Crow Agency in Montana spoke for many Native people when she told us, "My Dad used to say, 'We give thanks everyday. . . .' " The Ohenten Kariwatekwen is often called the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, but translated directly the name refers to "words spoken before all others." The Haudenosaunee nations—the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora—traditionally open and close every important gathering with a version of these thanks.
Six Nations Indian Museum and the Tracking Project
S. Joe Crittenden, deputy principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, talks briefly about his service in the U.S. Navy in the mid-1960s and what it has meant to his life. Five years ago, Deputy Chief Crittenden testified in support of the Act of Congress creating the National Native American Veterans Memorial. Now he is a member of the advisory committee seeing the memorial through to its dedication in 2020.
On October 26, delegations from the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, Oglala Sioux Tribe, Rosebud Sioux Tribe, Yankton Sioux Tribe, and Northern Arapaho Tribe traveled to Washington, D.C., to see the Treaty of Fort Laramie installed at the National Museum of the American Indian. Signed in 1868, the treaty was broken less than ten years later when the United States seized the sacred Black Hills. In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled that the United States had acted in bad faith, but the issue remains unresolved.
Jordan Cocker describes herself as “Indigenous in two ways—as Native American from the Southern Plains, K’gou màyí, a Kiowa woman; and as Pasifika, a Tongan woman.” Thinking of herself “in halves,” however, doesn't reflect her lived experience. “The years spent on and between my two ancestral territories,” she says, “braided together my two lines in a good way. Everything is about the ancestors—who they are by name, what they did, where they went, and the legacy that they created and passed down to me. My ancestors on both sides of my family survived colonization, boarding school, and so many other types of trauma so that I can live in a good way.” The museum’s Dennis Zotigh interviews Jordan for Asian American Pacific Heritage Month.
This May the National Museum of the American Indian was privileged to host four remarkable Inuit women from Nunavut who were in Washington as guests of the Embassy of Canada to attend the opening of the exhibition "Captain George Comer and the Inuit of Hudson Bay." At a related symposium, Bernadette Dean, Rosie Kowna Oolooyuk, Manitok Thompson, and Veronica Connelly spoke of the knowledge of land, ocean, ice, sky, and animal behavior their people shared with George Comer, a whaler who wintered over at Cape Fullerton 14 times in the early 1900s. They also described the knowledge Inuit women needed to make life-saving caribou and sealskin clothing. Now they're concerned with passing that knowledge on, to help museums conserve Inuit collections and to help Inuit women heal from the deep-rooted scars left from attending Indian Residential Schools.
The Treaty with the Delaware Nation, signed at Fort Pitt in September 1778, represents a time when the newly independent United States needed American Indian allies to drive British troops from forts and outposts west of the Appalachian Mountains. Despite the treaty's provisions, however, conflict continued in the Ohio Territory, leading the Delaware people to look for safer lands farther north and west. This month, delegations from the Delaware Nation at Moraviantown, in southern Ontario; the Delaware Tribe of Indians, in northeastern, Oklahoma; and the Delaware Nation, in central Oklahoma, came to the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., to see the Treaty of Fort Pitt placed on exhibit and to honor their forebears, who made their marks to secure the future of their people.
Christian Parrish Takes The Gun (Apsáalooke Nation), who performs as Supaman, has won a Nammy (Native American Music Award), an Aboriginal Peoples Music Choice Award, and the 2017 MTV Video Music Award for "Best Fight Against the System"—the last as part of the group of Native and non-Native musicians who recorded "Stand Up/Stand N Rock." What motivates him, however, isn't recognition but spirituality, Native culture and values, the people he meets on the road, and the chance to make a difference in the world.
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