Tag Archives: National Museum of the American Indian

CUA SLIS 2011 Students Tour

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19 students and their two instructors from the Catholic University’s Art and Museum Libraries Institute were treated to a tour of the Museum Support Center (MSC) and the National Museum of American Indian’s Cultural Resources Center (NMAI/CRC) on Tuesday, July 27. Of course the libraries from both Centers were highlighted in the tours. This is the third consecutive year that the Libraries' two Suitland-based librarians have hosted this group.

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The MSC tour started at the MSC Library for a quick intro by MSC/NMNH librarian Gil Taylor on how the Libraries is meeting the challenges of 21st century library services. The group then was treated to a visit to the Museum Conservation Institute, expertly guided by MCI Tech Info Specialist Ann N’Gadi. At MCI, E. Keats Webb gave a tour of the MCI Imaging Studio, Mehdi Moini showed off some of his sophisticated and expensive analytical equipment. HaeMin Park and Jia-sun Tsang explained about the Paintings Studio with some real-life examples and then Don Williams regaled with the history of various furniture pieces under restoration. The group headed to wet-storage unit Pod 5 and were told many scientific fish tales by Dr. Jeff Williams, and included a look-see with a celebrity fish, the coelacanth. Afterwards, NMNH Collections Support staffer Joel Allen hosted a visit to the huge Pod 4 holdings, and detailed the careful care needed to store a myriad of fascinating objects of all sizes.

Following lunch at the MSC cafe, the group moved on to the NMAI/CRC where they had a general tour of the building led by NMAI Librarian, Lynne Altstatt. This tour included the indoor ceremonial area (which is the only room at the Smithsonian where you can light a fire), the NMAI Conservation Lab (where several Mellon fellows talked about their current projects), and the NMAI Library. At the library, the students were given information packets with materials for both the NMAI Library and the Smithsonian Institution Libraries. Lynne discussed the histories of the NMAI and the NMAI Library and also talked about the role of the Libraries at the Smithsonian. Several of the CUA students are hoping for library careers in a museum environment so there were several lively question and answer periods during the tour.  It is always a pleasure to work with such enthusiastic guests.

Check the Libraries' Flickr site for some more MSC tour photos.

—Lynne Altstatt and Gil Taylor

Indian Notes Now Available!

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No, not the rupee! We mean Indian Notes, a recent entry into the Libraries’ digital collection through the History, Art, and Culture (HAC) digitization project. Available through the Smithsonian Collection at the Internet Archive, access Indian Notes here. Lynne Altstatt, Librarian at the Vine Deloria, Jr. Library at the National Museum of the American Indian, selected this title for digitization because of the impact increased access will have for researchers of Native American culture. She adds, “Indian Notes was a quarterly serial publication designed to present the activities of the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation (MAI) and to present preliminary results of those activities. Volumes 1-7 were published by the MAI between 1924 and 1930. Publication of this serial resumed in 1972 and ended again in 1978 producing volumes 8-12. Two indexes for this serial publication were compiled by Museum staff, the first for volumes 1-7 and the second for volumes 8-12. In addition to this serial publication, the MAI also published a monographic series which is named Indian Notes and Monographs. The similarity in these names often leads to problems in finding materials. At the NMAI it is frequently remarked that it would have been wonderful if Heye could have used more imagination in the naming of his publications.”

From a technical perspective, this title is interesting in two ways: it illustrates a bit of museum history while highlighting the principal challenge often faced when digitizing collections — copyright clearance.

Indian Notes was published after 1923, the date which renders books exempt from copyright law. So, why were we able to scan this title and not others? Indian Notes was published by the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation. The basis for the collections at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI)  began with George Gustav Heye of the Museum of the American Indian (MAI). Gustav Heye is responsible for the acquisition of tens of thousands of objects during the early 1900’s and onward. Heye is somewhat notoriously known as a voracious collector of everything native in the Western Hemisphere.  Lynn Altstatt further explains, "while it is said that the only reason Heye had a museum is that he was a avid collector and wanted to own the objects, the MAI was run in a scholarly fashion on a par with other  major museums of the period." More information about the collection history at NMAI is available here.

Through the Heye Foundation, the MAI published Indian Notes starting in 1924 and, as mentioned above, in fits and starts, until 1978. In 1989 when the MAI’s collections were transferred to the the National Museum of the American Indian, so were the publication rights that were previously under the purview of the Heye Foundation. Consequently, the History, Art, and Culture  digitization project through the Smithsonian Libraries is able (and excited) to digitize selections published by the Heye Foundation! 

—Erin Thomas

New and Notable—National Museum of the American Indian Library

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Here are selected new books from the National Museum of the American Indian Library.

SymbolsThe book of symbols: archetypal reflections in word and image.

AZ108 .B66 2010

Imprint: Köln : Taschen, 2010.

Some 350 essays combine with 800 full-color images to evoke the hidden dimension of archetypal symbology. Each of the essays examines a given symbol's psychic processes and dynamics. Etymological roots, the play of opposites, paradox and shadow, the ways in which diverse cultures have engaged a symbolic image – all these factors are taken into consideration.

 

 

 

BarbariansBarbarians and brothers : Anglo-American warfare, 1500-1865. Wayne E. Lee.

DA66 .L44 2011

Imprint: Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2011.

"Barbarians and Brothers is a sophisticated, readable, and most important history of 'frightfulness' in Anglo-American war from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Lee makes clear that the level of violence in war-particularly the treatment of prisoners and civilians-was not just a matter of how soldiers and states perceived their enemies. Englishmen were more restrained in fighting brothers (other Englishmen) than barbarians (Irishmen or Native Americans). But violence also depended on complex and shifting relationships among the size of forces, the development of the state, the influence of international law and social norms, and the extent to which civilians were drawn into the fighting. This is an unusually rich and rewarding history."-Ira D. Gruber, Rice University

 

BrokenBroken circle : the dark legacy of Indian residential schools: a memoir. Theodore Fontaine. 

E96.5 .F66 2010

Imprint: [Surrey, B.C.] : Heritage House, c2010.

Theodore (Ted) Fontaine lost his family and freedom just after his seventh birthday, when his parents were forced to leave him at an Indian residential school by order of the Roman Catholic Church and the Government of Canada. Twelve years later, he left school frozen at the emotional age of seven. He was confused, angry and conflicted, on a path of self-destruction. At age 29, he emerged from this blackness. By age 32, he had graduated from the Civil Engineering Program at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology and begun a journey of self-exploration and healing. In this powerful and poignant memoir, Ted examines the impact of his psychological, emotional and sexual abuse, the loss of his language and culture, and, most important, the loss of his family and community. He goes beyond details of the abuses of Native children to relate a unique understanding of why most residential school survivors have post-traumatic stress disorders and why succeeding generations of First Nations children suffer from this dark chapter in history. Told as remembrances described with insights that have evolved through his healing, his story resonates with his resolve to help himself and other residential school survivors and to share his enduring belief that one can pick up the shattered pieces and use them for good.

 

SacredSacred games, death, and renewal in the ancient Eastern Woodlands: the Ohio Hopewell system of cult sodality heterarchies. A. Martin Byers.

E99.H69 B95 2011

Imprint: Lanham : AltaMira Press, c2011.

The book presents an account of the Ohio Middle Woodland period embankment earthworks, ca 100 B.C. to A.D. 400, that is radically different from the prevailing theory. Byers critically addresses all the arguments and characterizations that make up the current treatment of the embankment earthworks and then presents an alternative interpretation. This unconventional view hinges on two basic social characterizations: the complementary heterarchical community model and the cult sodality heterarchy model. Byers posits that these two models interact to characterize the Ohio Middle Woodland period settlement pattern; the community was constituted by autonomous social formations: clans based on kinship and sodalities based on companionship. The individual communities of the region each have their clan components dispersed within a fairly well-defined zone while the sodality components of the same set of region-wide communities ally with each other and build and operate the embankment earthworks. This dichotomy is possible only because the clans and sodalities respect each other as relatively autonomous; the affairs of the clans, focusing on domestic and family matters, remain outside the concerns of the sodalities and the affairs of the sodalities, focusing on world renewal and sacred games, remain outside the concerns of the clans. Therefore, two models are required to understand the embankment earthworks and no individual earthwork can be identified with any particular community. This radical interpretation grounded in empirical archaeological data, as well as the in-depth overview of the current theory of the Ohio Middle Woodland period, make this book a critically important addition to the perspective of scholars of North American archaeology and scholars grappling with prehistoric social systems.

 

PeruPeru: a chronicle of deception: attempts to transfer the Awajún border territory in the Cordillera del Cóndor to the mining industry. Research Team of the Organization for the Development of the Border Communities of El Cenepa-ODECOFROC; [translation, Sylvia Fisher Carrasco].

F3430.1.A35 P478 2010

Imprint: Distrito de Cenepa, Provincia Condorcanqui, Amazonas, Peru : ODECOFROC ; Lima, Peru : Racimos de Ungurahui Working Group ; Copenhagen, Denmark : International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, 2010. 

 This report argues and demonstrates that the Peruvian government acted in bad faith by modifying the original proposal to create the Ichigkat Muja National Park agreed upon with the Awajún and Wampís indigenous communities of the District of El Cenepa, Department of Amaonas, Peru. The proposal to create a protected natural area in the Cordillera del Cóndor, the traditional land of these peoples, was prepared together with the environmental authority of the Peruvian government through a long negotiation process and detailed scientific studies, with the purpose of preserving an extremely vulnerable area at the headwaters of the Cenepa River, and as a result of the contribution made by the Awajún and Wampís communities to the establishment of long-lasting peace along the Peruvian-Ecuadorian border. 

The report also proves that the Peruvian government acted in this manner in order to benefit mining entrepreneurs, some of whom maintain strong political ties with senior government officials. As a result, the territory of these peoples has been threatened, and their rights, not to mention the national and international laws that protect them, have been challenged. 

The Awajún and Wampís communities and their representative organiations have continuously demanded the following: the reestablishment of the original proposal to create the National Park and the cancelation of mining concessions; neither have been granted by authorities. This situation serves as a basis for the claims made by the indigenous movement that led to massive demonstrations in 2008 and 2009, in addition to a prolonged strike, which culminated in the bloody events of Bagua (June 5, 2009), when the government violently intervened to evacuate the Awajún and Wampís contingents that had blocked a highway. 

 

RemovalEncyclopedia of American Indian removal. Daniel F. Littlefield Jr. and James W. Parins, Editors.

E98.R4 E63 2011

Imprint: Santa Barbara, Calif. : Greenwood, c2011.

In 1830, Andrew Jackson became the first U.S. president to implement removal of Native Americans with the passage of the Indian Removal Act. Less than a decade later, tens of thousands of Native Americans—Cherokee, Chickasaw, Muscogee-Creek, Seminole, and others—were forcibly moved from their tribal lands to enable settlement by Caucasians of European origin.

Encyclopedia of American Indian Removal presents a realistic depiction of removal as a complicated process that was deeply affected by political, economic, and tribal factors, rather than the popular romanticized concept of American Indians being herded west by military troops through a trackless wilderness. This work is presented in two volumes. Volume One contains essays on subjects and people that are general in scope and arranged alphabetically by subject; Volume Two is dedicated to primary documents regarding Indian removal and examines specific information about political debates, Indian responses to removal policy, and removals of individual tribes.

—Lynne Altstatt

NMAI Library hosts Grad Students

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On the afternoon of April 8 the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) Librarian, Lynne Altstatt, provided a tour for a group of thirteen recently graduated students from the Emporia State University’s School of Library and Information Management and three faculty members. The students were part of the Emporia Diversity Initiative (EDI) program, a 3-year long (2006-2009), multi-partner project led by Emporia State University’s School of Library and Information Management to recruit and educate local minority library staff in Kansas, Colorado and Oregon.

The EDI is funded with $857,754 dollars as a part of the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Laura Bush 21 st Century Librarian Program awards of 2006. The students were attending a week-long seminar "Preserving Cultural Identity: Treasuring America’s Diversity through Librarianship" in Washington, DC. The seminar was planned to introduce the students to the importance of maintaining cultural legacies within their community. By encouraging the creation of oral histories and the preservation of cultural property, diverse ethnic and cultural differences will be saved, thereby encouraging positive community-based action through library service.

Emporia

Altstatt gave the group a tour of the NMAI Cultural Resources Center, with special attention paid the the NMAI Library. In the Conservation Department two Mellon fellows discussed their current projects and answered the student's questions. Altstatt also provided to the group the history of the National Museum of the American Indian and its predecessor, the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation. She also talked about the responsibilities and daily work life of a museum librarian and shared stories about working in the museum library. The tour ended with a short presentation about the NMAI Archives by the Head Archivist, Jennifer O'Neal.

—Lynne Altstatt

Selected New Books from the NMAI Library

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Here are some new titles that cam in last month to the National Museum of the American Indian Library.

Image001 (1) Peoples of the earth: ethnonationalism, democracy, and the indigenous challenge in "Latin" America, Martin Edwin Andersen; foreword by Robert A. Pastor. GN564.L29 A53. 2010. Imprint: Lanham, Md. : Lexington Books, c2010.

"Scholars in the field of comparative ethnic nationalism have long been frustrated by the nearly total absence of information concerning the indigenous peoples of Latin America. They have been treated as outside of the sociopolitical realm, slighted by their governments and intellectuals, as well as by writers from outside Latin America. Political mobilization in recent decades among the indigenes of the Andean Cordillera from Mexico to Bolivia has belatedly forced their governments and the outside world to acknowledge them as a consequential force, but insightful, comparative analysis of these movements and their likely outcomes is needed. Martin Edwin Andersen's manuscript is a giant step in meeting that need."– Walker Connor, author of Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding

Image002 (1) The Swift Creek gift: vessel exchange on the Atlantic Coast, Neill J. Wallis. E78.G3 W25 2011. Imprint: Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, c2011.

“While studies in the past have used petrographic analysis, means such as neutron activation analysis, and the recognition of stamped paddle matches to analyze pottery, Wallis combines the results of all three of these types of analysis to produce a clearer understanding of the place of manufacture of Late Swift Creek ceramics on the coast of Georgia and northern Florida. Wallis clearly demonstrates that pots were exchanged between the Altamaha River area of Georgia and the mouth of the St. Johns River area in Florida. He interprets this exchange as evidence of mate exchange between the two areas. He also clearly documents that foreign vessels were used almost exclusively in mortuary contexts in northern Florida.” —Marvin T. Smith, author of Archaeology of Aboriginal Culture Change in the Interior Southeast

Image003 (1) Sherman Alexie: a collection of critical essays, edited by Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush. PS3551.L35774 Z87 2010.    Imprint: Salt Lake City : University of Utah Press, c2010.

Sherman Alexie is, by many accounts, the most widely read American Indian writer in the United States and likely in the world. A literary polymath, Alexie's nineteen published books span a variety of genres and include his most recent National Book Award-winning The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Now, for the first time, a volume of critical essays is devoted to Alexie's work both in print and on the big screen. Editors Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush have assembled twelve leading scholars of American Indian literature to provide new perspectives on a writer with his finger on the pulse of America. Interdisciplinary in their approach to Alexie's work, these essays cover the writer's entire career, and are insightful and accessible to scholars and lay readers alike. This volume is a worthy companion to the work of one of our nations's most recognized contemporary voices. "The bar is raised. I believe this work will be seen as a role model for literary criticism of Native American fiction, poetry, and film." –Simon Ortiz, poet and professor of English at Arizona State University

Image004 (1) Ancient lives: an introduction to archaeology and prehistory, Brian M. Fagan. CC165 .F24 2010 Imprint: Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall, c2010.

Written in an easy-to-read, jargron-free style interlaced with the author's first-hand archaeology experiences, this introduction to the most fundamental principles, methods, and theoretical approaches of archaeology is designed for the complete beginner. Featuring truly global coverage–reflected in examples from all parts of the world–it paints a compelling portrait of archaeology, science, and the past. Readers gain a basic grounding in the conceptual, technical, and ethical aspects of the subject; the career opportunities it offers; and some of the spectacular, and not-so-well known, discoveries that illuminate our past. "Doing Archeology" boxes and a brief guide to archaeological Web resources provide a hands-on perspective. What Happened in Prehistory? What Is Archaeology? Culture and the Archaeological Record. How Old Is It? How Do Cultures Change? Ancient Environments. Finding the Past. Digging Up the Past. Artifacts of the Ancients. How Did People Live? Settlement and Landscape. People of the Past. The Archaeology of the Intangible. So You Want to Become and Archaeologist! For general readers interested in the concepts and methods of archaeology. From the back cover…

—Lynne Alstatt