Oneida Nation Museum
De Pere, Wisconsin
Some of the Oneida Nation Museum in De Pere, Wisconsin, is outside. Guides lead groups on tours of wooded nature trails and raised garden beds, which are planted specifically to relate to the culture. The museum’s Three Sisters Garden features Oneida staples — corn, beans and squash — and another garden grows strawberries, which are “really important to our culture,” said museum director Rita Lara. In the Iroquois creation story, when Sky Woman was falling down to Turtle Island, she grabbed two plants: Indian tobacco and strawberries.
“I think we’re very fortunate to be able to tell the story of the Oneida from the beginning of the creation story up until today,” Lara said.
On the grounds, the museum also has a replica runner’s hut, and guides talk about how runners carried messages between villages. A replica maple syrup camp shows how the Oneida tapped maple trees. Signs in both Oneida and English identify wild plants that are traditionally used in food and medicine.
Inside the museum, visitors find 14 exhibit areas, including a small replica of a longhouse where guests can handle furs and corn husk dolls. The museum also offers hands-on activities, so groups can learn how to make a traditional corn husk doll, a pinch pot or raised beadwork, and have a memento to take home with them.
About eight miles from the museum is the Oneida Cultural Heritage Grounds, where visitors can tour five restored log homes that “are the real log homes that individuals in our community grew up in,” Lara said. Guides take people into the houses and talk about the families that lived there and their daily lives. The museum can also bring in a storyteller or a tribal historian for group presentations.
https://oneida-nsn.gov/museum/
Alaska Native Heritage Center
Anchorage, Alaska
Kyle Roberts, museum development manager for the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage who is Sugpiaq from Kodiak, is “a firm believer that the more you know about something, the more value it has to it.”
That philosophy is true, both for the center’s visitors and the center’s students. The museum offers programs that aim to teach Alaska Native youth about their own cultures and thereby preserve their heritage. In the winter, the after-school program teaches students about art, dance and native games. In the summer, the center hires some of those students to work as guides, interpreters and performers.
“They’re employed to learn; we’re paying them to learn and perpetuate the cultures,” Roberts said. “[Visitors are] in awe of the connection that’s still alive today and the connection with the way we lived thousands of years ago — and still do today.”
In addition to exhibits showcasing Alaska’s 11 indigenous cultures, the center offers daily 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 to let them know if the hunt was successful.
The center also recently launched an artist residency program that brought in nearly 40 artists from all over Alaska last summer to make their art and work with the interns. Guests can meet the artists, watch them work and ask questions.
Outside the museum, a wooded trail leads visitors to six life-size replicas of traditional Alaska Native dwellings. Guests can step inside 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 furs, baskets, oil lamps and wooden snow goggles.
