Posted on: Sunday, September 26, 2004
Visit more great Indian museums
| • | American Indian Museum takes its place on Mall |
| • | Exhibits you don't want to miss |
By Richard Nilsen
Arizona Republic
The National Museum of the American Indian in Washington pulls the stories of native peoples all together, but there are scores of smaller and more focused museums around the continent that tell smaller bits of the story in greater detail.
Gannett News Service Many of them are worth a visit if you are in the area, and some — the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles, the Eiteljorg in Indianapolis and the Peabody in Cambridge, Mass. — are destination stops for those interested in the subject matter.
Of special note is the stupendous Mashantucket Pequot Museum, which, according to Gary Avey, publisher and executive editor of Native Peoples magazine, "is a most unusual museum and the only one I'm aware of that started with no museum collection."
The museum manages to tell the story of the Pequot Indians with the newest and most-up-to-date museum technology, even without the beadwork, blankets and paintings.
Some cover regional subjects. Others take on the history of a single Indian nation.
The diversity of the indigenous peoples of the Americas is celebrated at the National Museum of the American Indian. Many smaller museums across the nation tell bits of the story in greater detail.
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| Indian nations
Demographers estimate that 6 million to 9 million American Indians lived in what became the United States when Christopher Columbus arrived. By 1900, there were barely 250,000. In the 2000 Census, about 2.4 million people identified themselves as American Indian or Alaska Native and 1.8 million more said they were American Indian plus one or more other races. The most-often cited tribes that American Indians and mixed-race Indians said they were members of: Cherokee: 729,533 Navajo: 298,197 Canadian/Latin American Indians: 192,770 Choctaw: 158,774 Sioux: 153,360 Chippewa: 149,669 Apache: 96,833 Blackfeet: 85,750 Iroquois: 80,822 Pueblo: 74,085 |
