BGuthrie Photos: NY -- NYC -- Natl Museum of the American Indian (Alexander Hamilton US Customs House) -- Indian Exhibits

NY -- NYC -- Natl Museum of the American Indian (Alexander Hamilton US Customs House) -- Indian Exhibits:

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. NMAIIN_161004_005.JPG: Native mariners discovered the Caribbean thousands of years before Columbus arrived. When Spanish ships landed at Guanahani, on October 12, 1492, the Greater Antilles were densely inhabited by diverse Native peoples. Speaking several languages, they lived in independent and self-sufficient communities. Centuries earlier, large Taíno chiefdoms had expanded over several islands, establishing a sphere of influence that extended from Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, through most of Cuba, to the Lesser Antilles. Far from isolating different islands, the Caribbean Sea linked Native communities to one another and allowed for the constant exchange of goods and ideas. Distinctive objects, such as the stone or wood duhos (ceremonial seats) exhibited here, show South American influence, evidence of long-distance links as early as 400 BC to AD 500. The presence of these seats suggests an exchange not simply of goods, but also of specific hierarchical forms of social and political life. This case presents evidence of the long history of Taíno culture, including pieces made by contemporaries of the Indians who first greeted Columbus.
2. NMAIIN_161004_010.JPG: The landscape of Mesoamerica gave rise to several of history's great civilizations and contemporary Native peoples, among them the Olmec (1500–400 BC) of the tropical lowlands of southern Mexico; the great central Mexican city Teotihuacán (200 BC–ca. AD 600); the Classic Veracruz cultures (AD 100–1000) along the Gulf of Mexico; the Maya, whose history reaches back 4,000 years and whose 21st-century population numbers 7 million; and the Triple Alliance (or Aztec Empire), which fell to Cortés in 1521. The Maya, who devised the ancient Americas' most sophisticated writing system and astronomical calendar, built monumental cities in Central America and southern Mexico. Extensive trade routes over land trails and waterways supplied exotic materials for luxury goods -- pieces that express the power and prestige of rulers who traced their authority to the deities. Communities with access to highland resources, such as obsidian, stuccoed pottery, and thin orange wares, traded for lowland resources, including cacao, cotton, rubber, and birds or feathers. Between 1430 and 1521, three cities on the central Mexican plateau -- Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan -- spread their control from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific, and from the Tarascan highlands in West Mexico to the modern border between Mexico and Guatemala. Rulers of the Triple Alliance moved quickly to integrate conquered cities into their imperial structure, secure local goods, and begin the flow of trade and tribute to Tenochtitlan, the main capital. Founded in 1325, Tenochtitlan at its height had a population of around 200,000. In Europe, only Paris and Constantinople were as large.
3. NMAIIN_161004_016.JPG: The Amazon River winds nearly 4,000 miles from its headwaters along the eastern slopes of the Andes to the Atlantic. The Amazon Basin -- a watershed comparable in size to the contiguous United States -- is the largest remaining tropical rain forest in the world. Many ecologists attribute the forest's survival to the knowledge of plant and animal interactions, and hunting and farming practices, of the hundreds of Native peoples who have lived along the river and its tributaries for millennia. Adaptation to life in the Amazon rests, in part, on the development of trade and exchange routes along rivers and forest paths. Many of the objects shown here reveal ways in which Amazonian peoples have maintained relationships with nature, within households, among peoples who speak the same language, and between different language groups. Ceremonial stools -- indispensible possessions for shamans, chiefs, and warriors -- are made by specialists in Tukano villages along the Vaupés River in the northwestern Amazon and traded within a larger network of communities. Asháninka textile arts can be traced, in part, to ties with Andean peoples noted for their ancient weaving traditions. The kithaarentze, or cotton poncho, is an Asháninka man's most prized possession, and therefore his most valued gift or exchange item. The survival of the peoples of the Amazon has also depended on their ability to withstand incursions from the outside world. That struggle continues today, as Amazonian Native nations organize to protect their rain forest homelands against intrusion and deforestation.
4. NMAIIN_161004_026.JPG: Throughout the Andes Native peoples shared complex symbolism and art forms over wide distances, a remarkable feat in a region defined by the world's second-highest mountain range. Most striking is the exchange of ideas and styles of artistic expression seen in the rich traditions of ceramic and textile production, metal- and jewelry-working, and architecture practiced by many divergent, yet historically related societies before the 16th-century Spanish invasion. The achievements of these ancient peoples resonate in the objects shown here. Successive cultures -- including Calima and Muisca in Colombia; Valdivia and Manteño in Ecuador; Tiwanaku in Bolivia; and Cupisnique, Paracas, Moche, and Nazca in Peru -- created objects that honored their deities and rulers and celebrated their way of life. Pre-contact Andean arts also reflect the grandeur of the Huarí, Chimú, and Inka empires, sophisticated societies that built cosmopolitan cities, united vast territories, and encompassed diverse peoples. Ruling families and social elites displayed sumptuous possessions to signal their wealth and confirm their authority. Iconic images honored the status of these elites by indicating their direct lineage to the sun (Taita Inti) and Mother Earth (Pachamama). The celestial or cosmic family -- represented by the sun, the earth, the moon, and the stars -- continues to appear in ceremonies in the Andes and throughout the Americas. Today, as many as 12 million people still speak Aymara and Quechua, the languages of Tiwanaku and the Inka Empire. Millions more live in their ancestral villages, maintain aspects of Andean culture, and take pride in their Native heritage.
5. NMAIIN_161004_030.JPG: Native peoples settled Patagonia, Gran Chaco, and Tierra del Fuego -- the southernmost reaches of South America -- thousands of years ago. Inspired by ancient stories that recall the creation of their homelands, the Mapuche of southern Chile and Argentina resisted subjugation by the Inka Empire and the Spanish Crown. Living on their ancestral lands, they forged a strong way of life -- admapu -- that has guided their response to outside forces. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the Mapuche traded textiles and other goods for Spanish silver coins, which they fashioned into distinctive jewelry and elaborate horse ornaments. Though challenged in the 20th century by the loss of much of their land, more than one million Mapuche continue to live in Chile and Argentina, many in cities, maintaining traditions that connect them to their region of origin. Farther south, the Yámana and Selk´nam kept constant fires burning on the large string of islands at the tip of South America -- Tierra del Fuego, "land of fire." These two peoples had sporadic contact with Europeans from the time of Magellan's exploration along the coast in 1520. They were less impacted by contact than many Native cultures -- until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when they were virtually annihilated by the sudden and dramatic increase of European settlers. Today, few people identify themselves as descendants of the Yámana or Selk´nam.
6. NMAIIN_161004_033.JPG: Infinity of Nations Art and History in the Collections of the National Museum of the American Indian
7. NMAIIN_161004_038.JPG: Infinity of Nations
8. NMAIIN_161004_044.JPG: Conductors of Our Own Destiny, 2003 Dallin Maybee
9. NMAIIN_161004_050.JPG: An Indian Rumpus, 2012 Dallin Maybee
10. NMAIIN_161004_055.JPG: Wah Zha Zhe Creation, 21st-Century Ledger Drawing No. 54, 2012 Chris Pappan
11. NMAIIN_161004_064.JPG: In the American Southwest, Pueblo peoples tell of their ancestors' journeys through the region's arid canyons and mesas. Ancient stories tie the present-day Pueblo peoples to their origins and ancestral lands, where Native people built and rebuilt stone or adobe dwellings, often occupied them for hundreds of years, and then moved on. The earliest Pueblo material in the museum's collection, dating to between 550 BC and AD 500, was recovered from caves at Grand Gulch. The beginnings of Pueblo pottery traditions can also be seen in materials found at Mesa Verde (AD 600–1300), well known for its spectacular cliff dwellings. Other important pieces were collected from Chaco Canyon (AD 800s–1100s), where ancestral Pueblo peoples built large, multistoried masonry buildings, the most impressive of which is Pueblo Bonito. Regional centers arose throughout the Southwest. The first to emerge was the extensive site of villages and irrigation canals known as Hohokam (AD 200–1400), a culture regarded as ancestral by the Akimel O´odham and Tohono O´odham of Arizona. Farther south, Casas Grandes, with its ritual and trading center Paquimé, flourished from AD 1200 to 1450. Macaw parrots, native to the tropical lowlands of southern Mexico, were bred at Paquimé, hub of the precious-feather trade during the 14th and 15th centuries. Vast quantities of shell beads found at Grand Gulch provide evidence that ancestral Pueblo peoples had links with the coast of Southern California very early on. Hohokam ball courts and cacao found on pottery from Pueblo Bonito suggest rituals shared between Mesoamerica and the Southwest.
12. NMAIIN_161004_068.JPG: Indians of the Southwest -- Pueblo-speaking peoples, Diné, Apache, O´odham, Yuman, and Pais -- maintained spheres of interaction within and beyond the region. Eventually these nations incorporated non-Native peoples and markets into their economic and political life. European wares appeared at Indian fairs in Taos, Pecos, and elsewhere, where southwestern textiles, pottery, turquoise, and maize had long been traded for Plains hides and dried meat. Ancient trails linking the Southwest and Mesoamerica provided the route Europeans sought north from New Spain (Mexico). The most significant encounter took place on June 7, 1540. A:shiwi oral history describes how a small group of men on pilgrimage encountered soldiers led by the conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado. The A:shiwi laid a line of corn meal on the earth, to communicate their religious purpose. The Spanish disregarded it and attacked the village of Hawikku. Spanish exploitation of Indian labor and forced conversion to Christianity sparked the Pueblo uprising of 1680. During the revolt, Pueblos captured the largest herd of horses ever taken by North American Indians, laying the groundwork for a new Indian trade. Spanish attempts to establish Catholic missions are evident in the A:shiwi-made altar vessels shown here, which date to between 1629, when the Franciscan church was built at Hawikku, and the year of the Pueblo uprising. American expansion into the region after 1846 is revealed in the Akimel O´odham calendar stick, which records the coming of the railroad in 1886, and the Chiricahua Apache deer hide painting, made by Naiche during the Chiricahuas' 27-year captivity by the U.S. Army.
13. NMAIIN_161004_074.JPG: Images of Plains and Plateau tribes have been shaped largely by the bitter "Indian Wars" of the latter half of the 19th century, when many Native communities fought U.S. efforts to extinguish Indian control of tribal lands. Accounts of this conflict dominated the nation's newspapers and illustrated magazines at the beginning of the media age, to the extent that, for many people, the Plains warrior remains the iconic American Indian. The Indians of the Plains and Plateau have always valued courage in war. During the second half of the 19th century, the Omaha Dance, which honors the deeds of warriors, spread from the Omaha Nation to other tribes on the Plains. These societies, however, have also always been linked by social, cultural, diplomatic, and trade relations. Living on a vast prairie that supported huge herds of buffalo, elk, and deer, these peoples paid homage to the Creator and to the natural world that sustained their lives. Several of the objects highlighted here are associated with Plains and Plateau leaders who fought to defend their nations in the 1870s and 1880s. Yet the museum's collections from the same time and place also include a beautifully beaded cradleboard, a deer-hide dress decorated with cowrie shells, and the fashionable Victorian wedding ensemble worn by Inshata–Theumba (Susette La Flesche), an activist who campaigned for Indian citizenship and land rights. As these objects and their histories illustrate, clearly there were many ways of being Indian in the 19th-century American West, and they involved great creativity and resilience. George Heye's Legacy: Plains and Plateau During the 1930s, a terrible drought parched the Plains. In North Dakota, members of the Hidatsa Water Buster Clan asked Heye to return a medicine bundle important in ceremonies to bring rain. Heye was initially reluctant to part with the bundle, which he acquired in 1927, twenty years after the son of the clan's bundle-custodian sold it to a Presbyterian missionary. When the press and government officials showed interest in the clan's request, Heye changed his mind. In 1938, two Hidatsa elders, Drags Wolf and Foolish Bear, traveled east to collect the medicine bundle. Their first stop was Washington, D.C., where they met President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The next day, the Hidatsa attended a ceremony in New York, where they gave Heye a powder horn and war club in exchange for the medicine bundle. In 1977, twenty years after Heye's death, museum curators came upon a wooden box, stashed in a stairwell. Inside were items that belonged with the medicine bundle. It is unclear if the contents had become separated from the bundle or were deliberately set aside. The items were later returned to the Hidatsa.
14. NMAIIN_161004_079.JPG: Assiniboine (Stoney) rifle case ca. 1890 Finely made gun cases were decorated with beadwork and long fringe by several Plains groups. The exchange of artistic ideas across the Plains can be seen in the beaded panels on this Assiniboine case, which are stylistically Lakota.
15. NMAIIN_161004_082.JPG: "You have guns and so have we. You have powder and lead, and so have we. You have men and so have we. Your men will fight and so will ours, till the last drop of the Seminole's blood has moistened the dust of his hunting ground." -- Osceola Leg Garters associated with Osceola, ca 1835 These leg garters likely belonged to the Seminole leader Osceola. Born in 1804 to Polly Coppinger, a part Muscogee Creek woman, Osceola was the most famous of several Seminole leaders who rose to prominence during the Second Seminole War, from 1835 to 1842. Osceola, whose name means Black Drink Singer, was also strong in medicine and was known for his ability to consume the black drink made from yaupon holly. Osceola's great strength as a leader in war was his ability to plan and supervise multiple attacks. He was involved in more than a dozen battles and skirmishes and led Seminole warriors and their Creek and African-American allies against the U.S. Army and Florida militia and volunteers from 1835 until 1837, when illness led him to surrender. Osceola enjoyed the stature and recognition that he had earned. George Catlin produced two paintings of Osceola. In each of them the war leader wears clothes of Seminole tradition. These finger-woven wool garters, which have beads woven into the pattern, are very similar to the garters Osceola wore in Catlin's full-length portrait, painted in 1838, shortly before the Seminole leader's death while he was imprisoned at Fort Moultrie, South Carolina. The image became widely known through a lithograph published by Catlin.
16. NMAIIN_161004_087.JPG: "Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pocanet, and other powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before the summer sun… Will we let ourselves be destroyed in our turn, without making an effort worthy of our race? Shall we without a struggle, give up our homes, our lands, bequeathed to us by the Great Spirit? The graves of our dead and everything that is dear and sacred to us? I know you will say with me, Never! Never!" -- - Tecumseh, 1811 Pipe tomahawk presented to Chief Tecumseh (Shawnee, 1768–1813) ca. 1812 This ceremonial pipe-tomahawk, a gift from Colonel Henry Procter to Tecumseh, probably was presented to the Shawnee war chief at Fort Malden, in Amherstburg, Ontario, late in the autumn of 1812. During that summer, when the War of 1812 officially started, Tecumseh led Native American warriors against the Americans on the Detroit frontier. In mid-August he joined with British forces led by General Isaac Brock to capture Detroit from General William Hull and an American army. Tecumseh admired Brock's decision to prosecute the war against the Americans vigorously, and Tecumseh and Brock became good friends. After Brock was killed on October 13, 1812, the British command passed to Procter. More cautious than Brock, Procter was reluctant to attack American positions in Ohio, and Tecumseh soon lost patience with his hesitancy. In response, Procter met repeatedly with Tecumseh and other Native Americans, attempting to maintain their loyalty and support for the Crown. At these meetings the British often awarded tomahawks and other gifts of weapons to tribal leaders. This tomahawk is typical of such a weapon and bears the inscription "To Chief Tecumseh / From Col. Proctor / MDCCCXII." (The inscription, with its alternate spelling of Procter, can be seen in the detail image below.) The tomahawk was probably made in France. The gift did little to mend the rift between Tecumseh and Procter. Less than a year later, on October 5, 1813, when the Americans attacked at the Battle of the Thames, Procter and the British fled from the field. Tecumseh and his warriors stood and fought, but Tecumseh was killed, and Native American armed resistance subsequently disintegrated. -- R. David Edmunds (Cherokee)
17. NMAIIN_161004_098.JPG: Peace medal 1676 The General Court of Massachusetts Bay granted this medal during the 17th-century conflict known as the War with the Indians of New England, later called King Philip's War. The English were losing to this indigenous alliance against colonial expansion until they pursued a full-scale effort to recruit Christian Indian scouts from a forced internment camp the English had established on Deer Island in Boston Harbor. While some Indians from the Praying Town of Natick and the Mohegan nation had assisted the English from the beginning, large-scale recruitment of men from Deer Island did not occur until the spring of 1676, when the English faced "frequent and violent" raids and every expedition to locate the encampments of the resistance had failed. As the missionary Daniel Gookin observed, "After our Indians went out, the balance turned of the English side." This medal was most likely given to the eighty men who formed an Indian company based in Charlestown under Captain Samuel Hunting. Officers of this company included Andrew Pittimee (of Natick), James Quanapohit (of Nashaway and Natick), John Magus (of Natick), Job Kattenanit (of Hassanamesit), and James Speen (of Natick), all of whom had been interned on Deer Island. Some of the Native men who served the English lost their lives in the war, but many returned to their Praying Towns. They petitioned to prevent the execution and enslavement of their relations who were falsely declared enemy combatants by the colony. Some were instrumental in securing land rights and in negotiating with the English after the war. Many of their descendants continue to serve as leaders in the Nipmuc communities in the state of Massachusetts today. The image on the medal is based on the Massachusetts seal, which was part of a marketing campaign to draw English settlers to the new colony. In the original seal, the Indian figure is portrayed saying, "Come over and help us," a reference to the missionary project. Ironically, it was the English who often required help, whether in navigating an unknown territory, learning to subsist upon native foods, or winning a war.
18. NMAIIN_161004_110.JPG: Woodlands history -- encompassing the United States and southern Canada east of the Mississippi River and along the shores of the Great Lakes -- spans a remarkable depth of time. The oldest objects shown here -- two re-fluted Clovis points found in upstate New York -- date to 11,000 BC and are among the earliest evidence of Paleoindian culture to be seen in any museum collection. The long-distance trade that occurred among peoples in the eastern Woodlands 6,000 to 1,000 years ago is among the most striking examples of regional interchange in all of Native North America. Bannerstones -- weights tied to atlatls (spear-throwers) to make it possible to throw spears farther -- are often found great distances from where their stone was quarried. Their widespread use indicates that Native peoples bridged vast distances from a remarkably early date. Between AD 900 and 1600, complex chiefdoms that built monumental architecture -- large platform mounds and open plazas -- emerged in the South. Chiefdoms' large population centers were supported by corn agriculture. Their societies, termed Mississippian, were highly stratified. In addition to controlling long-distance trade in ritual objects and materials as diverse as marine shell, wood, copper, pottery, and stone, ceremonial leaders controlled the exchange of knowledge beyond, as well as within, the Southeast. The shared symbolism on art found at Mississippian and other ancient sites speaks to the broad dissemination of knowledge throughout the Woodlands and farther west. Several of the pieces shown here were assembled by Clarence Bloomfield Moore, an amateur archeologist who excavated ancient Native sites in the Southeast from 1891 to 1918. When the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences sent Moore's 35,000-piece collection to storage, Heye offered cash to bring the assemblage to New York and made an impassioned appeal. "I will do anything in the world to help along the transaction," he told Moore. "I know positively this is the place for your magnificent collection, where it will be taken care of properly, will be of use to science, will not be neglected, and will be personally loved." When Heye's people arrived to collect the objects, they encountered Harriet Wardle, the academy's curator for archeology. Irate that Heye had arranged to spirit the collection to New York without her knowledge, Wardle resigned immediately. Heye considered the acquisition a great personal coup, but Wardle never forgave him or his associates. As one of Heye's successors recalled, Wardle "never met a member of the Heye Foundation without a glitter in her eye and a tightening of her lips."
19. NMAIIN_161004_113.JPG: shi (Yahi, b.?–1915), arrows 1911–1916 "Live like the white people from now on. I want to stay where I am. I will grow old here, and die in this house." -- Ishi, 1911, turning down an offer to leave the Museum of Anthropology and return alone to Northern California Ishi was a Yahi Indian, believed to be that last survivor of his people. Adhering to Yahi tradition, Ishi never uttered his own name, and so we do not know it. Ishi -- "man" in his native language -- was the name given to him by the anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber. Beginning with his emergence from the "wilds" of California in 1911 and his entrance into the public imagination, until his death from tuberculosis five years later, Ishi lived at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, San Francisco. During the last short years of his life, he served as a flesh-and-blood memorial to America's past and confirmation, in the popular imagination, of the "vanishing Indian." Ishi's arrows represent the hyper-real -- objects of ethnographic interest reproduced within the walls of the museum. One of the stories we might read from them is that they are authentic objects made by the last of the Yahi Indians, something salvaged from Yahi material culture. A counternarrative might be that having Ishi make items he knew would be used only for exhibition introduced performance art to the ethnographic museum. Alternatively, it may be that Ishi expressed the power of his identity by producing something no one else could -- or that with no way to resist being a sideshow, he made his position clear through the creation of implements of war and survival. Ultimately, these objects can be understood as telling a story of control and compromise or strategic accommodation -- or a combination of both. In opening a door for other Native peoples to work inside the museum, Ishi was not the last of his kind, but the first.
20. NMAIIN_161004_117.JPG: West of the Sierra Nevada, California has always drawn people to its varied climate and rich coast, valleys, and uplands. Before Spaniards arrived in the late 1700s, Native peoples lived in more than 200 autonomous communities and spoke more than 100 different languages -- making California one of the most culturally diverse places on earth. Spanish missionaries saw in Native California a wealth of souls to convert. During the Gold Rush, miners, loggers, and settlers formed vigilante groups and local militias to hunt Indians living outside the mission communities -- a genocide largely ignored by American history. The Native population, estimated at 150,000 in 1845, was by 1870 less than 30,000. In the Great Basin -- the arid lands east of the Sierra Nevada and west of the Rocky Mountains -- the Native population was never large. Yet this seemingly harsh land has supported Native peoples for more than 14,000 years. Basketry water jars -- always kept close at hand -- exemplify cultural knowledge and resourcefulness. In an environment where food sources were often found at great distances and travel was by foot, Great Basin Indians developed technologies that sustained their way of life well into the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when hydroelectric projects opened the desert to non-Native farming and settlement. In the 21st century, the contest for water and the development of appropriate, sustainable technologies continues to define life in California and the Great Basin. One of Heye's most intrepid collectors was Mark R. Harrington, a young archeologist who traveled throughout the United States, Mexico, and Cuba, conducting archeological digs, visiting tribal communities, and collecting objects between 1908 and 1928. Among Harrington's triumphs was the excavation in 1924 of Lovelock Cave in western Nevada. Long sealed by an earthquake, Lovelock Cave had been used for storage and shelter by Native peoples for several thousand years. Inside, Harrington uncovered extensive evidence of ancient Native life, including a cache of 2,000-year-old duck decoys, the world's oldest. Fashioned from tule reeds and feathers, the decoys once lured waterfowl to hunters in the marshlands of ancient Lake Lahontan. Harrington left Heye's museum in 1928, but always spoke kindly of his former boss. "During all my twenty years in George Heye's employ," he recalled, "I found him a wonderful man to work for." When Harrington's son was born, he and his wife named the baby Johns Heye Harrington.
21. NMAIIN_161004_125.JPG: Native peoples of the Northwest Coast have enriched their communities by exchange for more than 10,000 years. From Yakutat Bay in Alaska to the Columbia River in Washington state, Native fishermen and sea hunters traveled north and south by water and east into the interior over mountain passes to trade commodities such as oolichan oil, dentalium shells, copper, and mountain goat wool. In a region of great natural resources, this economy enabled Northwest Coast peoples to develop comfortable and sophisticated societies marked by social ranking, elaborate ceremonial life, and spectacular art created to celebrate the history and prestige of families, clans, and lineages. At feasts, or potlatches -- a word from the region's trading jargon -- the status of chiefly families was confirmed by their generosity to their guests. Through lavish gifts of staples and luxuries -- including, eventually, non-Native trade goods -- communities shared their wealth and maintained social balance. Encountering the Russians, French, Spanish, English, and Americans who arrived in the 18th century, experienced Native traders were quick to exchange local sea otter and other furs for guns, iron tools, and new materials used to create innovative styles of ceremonial regalia. As the fur trade declined and tourism began to increase, Native people produced objects to appeal to foreign tastes. Miniature versions of the giant totem poles that had captured the imagination of visitors to the coast, argillite carvings, and other new arts entered a collectors' market, and Northwest Coast artists became known and admired in countries far from their homes.
22. NMAIIN_161004_128.JPG: Hiłamas (Willie Seaweed or Smoky Top, ´Nak´waxda´xw Kwakwaka´wakw, 1873–1967), gikiwe´ (chief's headdress) ca. 1949
23. NMAIIN_161004_133.JPG: Along the coast of the Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea -- from Siberia, across Alaska and Canada, and east to Greenland -- Yup´ik, Unangan, and Inuit peoples live in the most forbidding environment on earth. Their ability to survive depends upon their understanding of land, ocean, ice, and sky, and of animal behaviors -- knowledge gained over thousands of years. For millennia, families exchanged goods and shared feasts and ceremonies with neighboring bands. By the 1700s, Native and non-Native traders were extending these chains of contact into the interior in response to European demand for furs. Whaling and prospecting brought further change to the region, as previously nomadic peoples established villages around the wintering sites of ships. In the Subarctic -- from Labrador to interior Alaska -- Innu, Cree, Athapaskan, and other Native peoples' hunted caribou and other game, fished, and preserved meat and hides. These proved to be marketable skills with French and English traders and trading companies. In the 1800s, people of mixed French and Native ancestry established distinct Métis communities in the region and created an exquisite new style of floral beadwork. Native people continue to hunt on ice and snow using snowmobiles and GPS and are sought-after observers of climate change. Nunavut, the largest federal territory in Canada, speaks to the continuity and sustainability of Native communities in this region. Established in 1999 on the lands and islands north and west of Hudson Bay, Nunavut's population of 30,000 is more than 80 percent Inuit.
24. NMAIIN_161004_143.JPG: Pedro Rafael Gonzalez Chavajay Tragedia, 1992
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Wikipedia Description: National Museum of the American Indian
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The National Museum of the American Indian is part of the Smithsonian Institution and is dedicated to the life, languages, literature, history, and arts of the Native Americans of the Western Hemisphere. It has three facilities: the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., which opened on September 21, 2004, on Fourth Street and Independence Avenue, Southwest; the George Gustav Heye Center, a permanent museum in New York City; and the Cultural Resources Center, a research and collections facility in Suitland, Maryland. The foundations for the present collections were first assembled in the former Museum of the American Indian in New York City, which was established in 1916, and which became part of the Smithsonian in 1990.

History

Following controversy over the discovery by Native American leaders that the Smithsonian Institution held more than 12,000–18,000 Indian remains, mostly in storage, United States Senator Daniel Inouye introduced in 1989 the National Museum of the American Indian Act. Passed as Public Law 101-185, it established the National Museum of the American Indian as "a living memorial to Native Americans and their traditions". The Act also required that human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony be considered for repatriation to tribal communities, as well as objects acquired illegally. Since 1989 the Smithsonian has repatriated over 5,000 individual remains – about 1/3 of the total estimated human remains in its collection.

On September 21, 2004, for the inauguration of the Museum, Senator Inouye addressed an audience of around 20,000 American Indians, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians, which was the largest gathering in Washington D.C. of indigenous people to its time.

The creation of the museum brought together the collections of the George Gustav Heye Center in New York Cit ...More...
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- 2016_NY_NMAI_Archives: NY -- NYC -- Natl Museum of the American Indian (Alexander Hamilton US Customs House) -- National Archives Office (28 photos from 2016)
- 2016_NY_NMAI: NY -- NYC -- Natl Museum of the American Indian (Alexander Hamilton US Customs House) (55 photos from 2016)
- 2001_NY_NMAI: NY -- NYC -- Natl Museum of the American Indian (Alexander Hamilton US Customs House) (11 photos from 2001)
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2016 photos: Seven relatively short trips this year: two Civil War Trust conference (Gettysburg, PA and West Point, NY, with a side-trip to New York City), my 11th consecutive San Diego Comic-Con trip (including sites in Utah, Nevada, and California), a quick trip to Michigan for Uncle Wayne's funeral, two additional trips to New York City, and a Civil Rights site trip to Alabama during the November elections. Being in places where people died to preserve the rights of minority voters made the Trumputin election even more depressing. Equipment this year: I continued to use my Fuji XS-1 cameras but, depending on the event, I also used a Nikon D7000. Number of photos taken this year: just over 610,000.
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