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Smithsonian Center for Folklife & Cultural Heritage

Digital illustration of a man in gray uniform standing in from an ornamental Chinese gate with red columns, tile roof, and Chinese characters.

Introducing Graphic Artist Jean Young’s Powerful New Visuals on the History of LA’s Chinatown

The original Los Angeles Chinatown, now known as “Old Chinatown,” developed in the 1860s.

Two men with long hair, one older and one younger, perform with eyes closed on stage. They each hold a painted rattle, and the older man in the foreground also holds a microphone.

A Kumeyaay Folktale Illuminates Why the Sun and Moon Shine at Different Times

The celestial beings took a lesson from two frogs in love

Carolyn Smith collecting beargrass in Klamath National Forest, 2015. For beargrass to be supple enough for weavers to use in their baskets, it needs to be burned annually. Ideally, it is burned in an intentionally set cultural fire, where only the tops are burned, leaving the roots intact. Prescribed fires in the Klamath National Forest are few and far between, so weavers “follow the smoke” and gather, when they can, after wildfires sweep through the landscape. (Photo courtesy of Carolyn Smith)

How Indigenous Ecological Knowledge Offers Solutions to California’s Wildfires

“We need to reintegrate Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge and cultural and prescribed burning into our landscape,” Carolyn Smith says.

Making crates to leave the camp, September 1945, Heart Mountain, Wyoming. (Illustration by Estelle Ishigo, courtesy Estelle Ishigo Collection, Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation. Gift of Bacon Sakatani in Memory of Arthur and Estelle Ishigo)

What They Carried When the Japanese American Incarceration Camps Closed

The closing of the World War II camps marks its seventy-sixth anniversary in 2021.

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