As you enter the village, you hear running water, dogs barking, birds chirping and the mingled voices of residents, including a man yelling “hub, hub, hub,” after winning a traditional game of chance.
The smell of wood smoke fills the air, and you watch the villagers go about their daily lives: fishing, cooking, tending a corn field, building a hut.
The year is 1550, and this realistic re-creation of a Mashantucket Pequot Indian woodland village is part of the technologically advanced Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Connecticut.
“You can see, hear and even smell what it was like in the village,” said David Holahan, the museum’s public relations director.
The huge museum, with 85,000 square feet of indoor exhibits, uses dioramas, text panels, interactive computers and more than a dozen film and video programs “to show how the tribe has evolved and changed,” said Holahan.
Groups can learn about the diverse cultures and heritage of North America’s many Indian tribes at a number of such interesting and informative sites.
Mashantucket Pequots
The multistory glass lobby and 170-foot observation tower of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum rise above the Connecticut woods within sight of the tribally owned Foxwoods Casino, whose profits helped fund the $193 million museum.
“We are trying to interpret history in the museum but also what it means to be a native people today,” said Holahan.
The first gallery is an exhibit of photographs of tribal members at work and play, and taped interviews with them about contemporary issues.
The museum then takes visitors on a chronological trip through the tribe’s history.
Realistic dioramas include a caribou hunt of 11,000 years ago, a 17th-century Pequot fort and an outdoor 18th-century two-acre farmstead with orchards and gardens.
Among the film presentations is the half-hour, large-screen movie The Witness, which uses professional actors to tell about the Pequot War of 1636-38, in which the tribe was nearly wiped out.
The most impressive feature is the 22,000-square-foot re-created village, what is known as an immersion environment diorama. The life-size human figures have realistic faces that were cast from living tribe members, and the air is filled with the computer-controlled sounds of 120 voices.
“If you are a birdwatcher, you can come in here and identify as many as 50 species of birds by their sound,” said Holahan.
www.pequotmuseum.org
Cherokees
One of the most tragic events in American history concerns the Cherokee. Despite having adopted many aspects of white culture, including a representative form of government, European-style dress and a written alphabet, the Cherokees were driven from their land — primarily in Georgia and North Carolina — in the late 1830s.
Although they were given land in Oklahoma, most of the Cherokees, many of them prosperous farmers and businessmen, lost most of their possessions. Even more tragically, thousands died on an arduous forced march west in the winter of 1838-39 that has since become infamous as the Trail of Tears.
The Cherokee nation’s former capital, New Echota, their version of Washington, D.C., is re-created at its original location near Calhoun, Ga.
Lifelike images in the Museum of the Cherokee Indian were made from living members of the tribe. Courtesy Museum of the Cherokee Indian |
There are more than a dozen original and reconstructed buildings at the state historic site. They include the Supreme Courthouse; the council house, where elected representatives from eight districts met; and the print shop, where interpreters produce copies of the tribe’s newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, on a hand press.
About a thousand Cherokee who hid in the mountains to avoid the forced removal to Oklahoma were the ancestors of today’s Eastern Band of Cherokee, who live on a reservation in western North Carolina on the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains.
Artifacts from the Cherokee past, such as farming utensils, weapons, clothing, pottery and baskets, are on display at the reservation’s state-of-the-art Museum of the Cherokee Indian.
Nearby is the Oconaluftee Indian Village, a re-creation of a Cherokee village from the mid-1700s, where members of the tribe, dressed in authentic clothing, practice ancient crafts such as basket weaving, ceramics and chipping arrowheads.
Each summer, the outdoor drama Unto These Hills tells the story of the Cherokee from 1540 up to the Trail of Tears.
At the Cherokee Heritage Center in Tahlequah, Okla., you can pick up the story of the Cherokee after their arrival in Oklahoma at another outdoor drama, Trail of Tears.
The center’s 44-acre site also includes the Cherokee National Museum and two living-history villages. The Tsa-La-Gi Ancient Village depicts Cherokee life before European contact, and Adams Corner re-creates a typical small community in Indian Territory in the late 1800s.
www.gastateparks.org/info/echota/
www.cherokee-nc.com
www.cherokeeheritage.org
Pueblo Indians
The Pueblo people trace their origins to the Anasazi, or “ancient ones,” who mysteriously disappeared around the 12th century.
The word pueblo refers to an Indian culture that is unique to the Southwest and not to a particular tribe. There are 19 Indian pueblos in New Mexico, and though they share many common elements, each pueblo has an independent government and its own social order and religious practices.
Although tours can be arranged to some of the pueblos, groups can get a good overview of the pueblo culture at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque.
The center is housed in a building modeled after Pueblo Bonito, a ninth-century ruin in Chaco Culture National Historic Park. The center’s permanent collection traces the evolution of the Indians from prehistory to the current pueblos. A large gift shop has a wide collection of authentic pottery, paintings, sculpture, rugs, sand paintings, kachinas, jewelry and drums.
There are displays of contemporary art from the various pueblos, and free dance performances and art demonstrations on the weekends.
www.indianpueblo.org
National Museum of the American Indian
The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, founded by an act of Congress in 1989, has three locations: the George Custav Heye Center in New York City; the Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Md.; and the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington.
The Heye Center, located in the beaux-arts former U.S. Custom House, has changing exhibits from the museum’s collection and traveling exhibitions from other institutions, along with regular performances of Native American dance and music.
Opened in September 2004, the National Museum of the American Indian is the first national museum dedicated exclusively to Native Americans, the first to present all exhibitions from a native viewpoint and the first constructed on the National Mall in 17 years.
Indigenous plants and landscapes, including a wetland, a forest and a meadow, surround the curved, five-story, gold-colored limestone building.
Inside, nearly 8,000 objects from the museum’s world-renowned collection are on display. The museum focuses on explaining and interpreting the cultures and traditions of North American native people.
“We didn’t want to make a history museum; we wanted to make a cultural museum,” said guide Sharyl Pahe, a Navajo and San Carlos Apache from Arizona.
There are eight tribes in each of three galleries, which explore native philosophies and histories, and the tribes’ 21st-century cultures.
The Cultural Resources Center, with its distinctive and symbolic radial steel and copper roof that was designed in consultation with native peoples from throughout the hemisphere, is home to the museum’s archives, library and collection of more than 800,000 objects.
www.americanindian.si.edu
