Museum bringing American Indian culture to life

WANT TO GO?

What: American Indian crafts demonstrations

When: 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Wednesday

Where: University Center at Southeast Missouri State University

Admission: Free

By Sam Blackwell ~ Southeast Missourian

When Jim Phillips leads tours of schoolchildren through display cases filled with bowls and other artifacts from the University Museum's Beckwith Collection, he points out that the things in their own cupboards at home could end up in a museum in a thousand years.

"We want to get them thinking that this is not a dead people," the curator of the Beckwith Collection said. "These are things they used every day."

This month, Native American Month, the museum is busy teaching grade school students and anyone else who wants to learn about how American Indians lived.

One exhibit includes museum collection examples of art, clothing, blankets and masks from different regions of North America. The East Gallery contains artifacts from the Beckwith Collection, one of the most important assemblages of Mississippian culture in existence.

Andrea Morrill, curator of education at the museum, is traveling to 17 schools around the region to present programs about American Indians. She brings artifacts that are more than 500 years old.

On some of the trips she is accompanied by Paul White Eagle of the AhNiYvWiYa tribe. He talks about his own culture and the cultures of other American Indian groups and sometimes leads the students in a dance.

Other school programs will include Amber Glenn, a naturalist with the Missouri Department of Conservation. Glenn presents a program titled "Life Before Wal-Mart," in which she uses reproductions of hoes, spears and other items.

"We show how they lived in this area and the things they may have used," Morrill said.

School tours of the University Museum are scheduled. In the tours, children can touch reproductions of the artifacts they see at the museum.

Wednesday at the University Center, White Eagle and other members of the AhNiYvWiYa tribe will provide demonstrations of American Indian crafts such as basket making, corn planting and use of the blowgun. The Department of Conservation also will participate.

First-graders from North Elementary School in Jackson will be present for the demonstrations.

American Indian civilization developed very differently from the European culture that eventually swept North America, Phillips said.

"They were not looking for material wealth, and they were not driven by technological achievement," he said.

The exhibitions and demonstrations "say a lot about how sophisticated native peoples were," Phillips said. "They really were not primitive."

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182