Indian collections

Over 800,000 artifacts and items of everyday use are housed in a state of the art research facility in Suitland, Maryland, for the National Museum of the American Indian at its Cultural Resources Center. The Center is the home for the things on exhibit at the museum in Washington, as well as its Indian museum in the Old Customs House in New York City, plus items on loan to museums around the world.

The building itself is quite striking. Much like the museum in the District, it has been designed with Indian sensibilities in mind and echos traditional Indian architecture. While there is an impressive entry foyer, this is not really a building designed for tourists and visitors. It's a working facility for museum curators and staffers, plus armies of archivists, librarians, and conservation specialists. They do occasionally have visitors from other museums seeking materials for an exhibit and the occasional graduate student or researcher, so there are a few rooms to accommodate their needs.

The grounds are also landscaped in an "Indian" way. A large bronze statue of the famous Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph stands near the entrance. They have a small ceremonial circle in the woods behind the building, and a small room inside the building serves as a ceremonial room complete with sand fire pit in the floor.

Chief Joseph	Ceremonial room

Conservation, repair, and preservation occupies a great deal of the center. They do things like put the pieces of old, shattered pottery back together, replace beads and porcupine quills on decorative pieces, and clean archeological finds. While I was in the textiles room, conservators were cleaning this beautiful Sac and Fox men's breechcloth with tweezers and a low-suction vacuum. It's made of navy blue wool broadcloth, edged with silk ribbon, and decorated with beads sewn on one at a time. The other end of the breechcloth has a similar beaded panel. The Sac and Fox, much like my tribe, makes use of a lot of abstract floral designs in their beadwork. I'm going to guess this piece comes from the Sac and Fox up in far northeastern Kansas (rather than the group in central Oklahoma for whom I used to be a supreme court justice) because they are making use of beads in that dusty rose color that is very, very popular with the Crow, a tribe in the northern plains.

All of the archivists were on hand today to show off their shelves and shelves of items, and they were all very helpful and friendly. Now, this picture is of a rack of stone carvings done by Indians/Inuits/Eskimos from the Arctic regions, and they all have a very distinctive style to them. While talking to the staff member working the Arctic shelves, we got to talking about the clothing items they had in the racks and whether or not they required any special "cold" climate control to prevent deterioration. He said they tried to keep some of the things cooler and less humid than other things in the overall collections because a lot of the leather items had been tanned with urine!

These storage cabinets are all on rollers so the entire row of units can be moved flush side-to-side to save space between aisles. If one wants to see something in the middle of a group of rows, one has to wait until people are done elsewhere and the aisles are clear so everything can be moved to open up a new aisle where one wishes to work. They also go up probably twenty feet high, so there was a lot I couldn't see or get to without an appointment and a ladder.

I took several dozen pictures of various things, especially Great Lakes region tribes' beadwork and ribbonwork, plus some Seminole items. If you'd like to see them, click here to go to my Flickr album.