Indian Pueblo Cultural Center
Albuquerque, New Mexico
The Indian Pueblo Cultural Center opened its doors in 1976 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as a place for the state’s 19 pueblos to come together. While it’s a resource for the pueblo communities, it’s also an educational center for people to learn about the pueblos’ history, art and culture, said Monique Fragua, the center’s vice president of operations.
“We want to represent the living cultures,” she said. “We use the past for inspiration, but we’re people of the present.”
The center customizes group experiences. If a group is interested in art, for example, guided tours can focus on artwork in the museum’s exhibits, and the group can add a hands-on experience with a pueblo artist.
The center’s Daily Artist Program allows visitors to watch and interact with artists as they make pottery, jewelry and stonework carvings and sculptures, and the center also provides artist demonstrations in the Shumakolowa Native Arts gift shop.
Dancers perform traditional dances every weekend throughout the year, but groups can also arrange to hire a dance group for private or after-hours performances.
Andrew Thomas, a flute player who has worked at the center for over 25 years, will provide a welcome, tell stories and play his flute, and “people always remember him,” Fragua said.
The center partners with the on-site Pueblo Harvest restaurant to provide various culinary experiences, such as a fry bread workshop where guests make and eat their own fry bread.
Pueblo Harvest uses crops grown within the pueblo communities in its seasonal menus, which feature feast day stew, posole, green chile, pueblo oven bread, pueblo cookies, pumpkin pudding and wojapi, a stewed-berry dessert.
In the center’s on-site Resilience Garden, groups can explore the story of pueblo agriculture from before European contact through today.
Alaska Native Heritage Center
Anchorage, Alaska
The Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage, Alaska, is not exactly a museum. Though it preserves and shares how Alaska’s 11 indigenous cultures have lived for thousands of years, the center also allows visitors to connect with how Alaska Natives live today.
The center’s daily schedule includes traditional storytelling, dance performances and demonstrations of Alaska Native games, such as the Alaska high kick and the two-foot high kick, which hunters traditionally used to signal the village about the outcome of a hunt. But guests also get to meet the people.
An elder will show groups how to make akutaq, which is like ice cream. Although it’s traditionally made of whipped reindeer fat or seal oil with berries, visitors make it with yogurt and fruit. Groups can also take dance lessons, participate in games and watch a salmon being filleted with an ulu knife before enjoying a fish bake.
Outside the museum, a wooded trail leads to six life-size replicas of traditional Alaska Native dwellings. Guests can step into an Athabascan log cabin or a Haida clan house. At each dwelling, a village site host from that region talks about the home and the tools inside. Visitors can handle traditional hunting tools and household items, such as oil lamps made of volcanic rock.
