Celebrate Native American Heritag‪e‬ Smithsonian Institution

The Thanksgiving holiday takes on a different meaning for contemporary Native Americans. Dennis W. Zotigh (Kiowa/San Juan Pueblo/Santee Dakota) gives personal perspective on the holiday.

We Were Always Here, a contemporary art installation carved by artist Rick Bartow (Wiyot), stands at the northwest corner of the National Museum of the American Indian site. Commissioned by the museum in 2011 to honor its eighth anniversary, the work was crafted primarily from a single old-growth western red cedar tree.

In this episode of the History Explorer Podcast, Sarah Coffee talks with curator Rayna Green about what we can learn from seemingly simple line drawings about the lives and memories of Plains Indians who lived over 130 years ago.

Tsimshian carver David Boxley created a totem pole for the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Boxley, who grew up in Metlakatla, Alaska, and his son finished the work in the museum's Potomac atrium, where the Tsimshian dance group Git–Hoan (People of the Salmon) celebrated the unveiling. “There’s few of us,” Boxley said of the Tsimshian. “But we're alive and well. We wanted to let people know we’re alive and well.” The totem features a chief holding salmon, a group of villagers, and an eagle—the symbol of Boxley’s clan.

David Hurst Thomas, a curator at the American Musem of Natural History in New York, discusses his experience as a non-Native and an anthropologist invited to be a founding trustee of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. His talk was part of a symposium examining the development of ethnic or culturally specific museums.

Douglas Herman, senior geographer at the National Museum of the American Indian, introduces “Stellar Connections: Explorations in Cultural Astronomy,” a symposium on ethno- or archaeoastronomy. In this first segment, Gary Urton, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Pre-Columbian Studies at Harvard University, presents a richly detailed talk on the cosmologies of three South American cultural traditions: the Desana and Barasana of Colombia; the Quechua/Inka of the Andes, and Bororo of the Amazon Basin.