Volume 15 Winter 2003 Issue No. 2

Keeping it Alive
Centers Contribute to Cultural Renaissance on College Campuses

by Richard Simonelli

Visit tribal colleges and universities around the country, and your tour guide will inevitably show off the log building on the campus. While they differ in size, shape, and function, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) Cultural Learning Centers all serve as centers of pride. Often a center is the first new building constructed for a college, which previously utilized a hodgepodge of second-hand facilities.

Cultural Learning Centers emerged from a dream Gail Bruce had about 10 years ago. Bruce, a founding board member of the American Indian College Fund, envisioned a cultural space housing elements and artifacts representing the identity of the people served by each college. She imagined a beautiful, safe location for newly repatriated cultural items that had been away from the tribe for a long, long time. And she also saw a center for community education that could serve the local college community's individual needs.

To build the centers, Bruce and her assistant, Anne Edinger, arranged a partnership involving AIHEC, the Log Homes Council, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the American Indian College Fund, the Lilly Endowment, and dozens of small companies and private donors. Other significant partners included the Carrier Corporation, New York Institute of Technology, and the National Museum of the American Indian. The story of the centers' creation is beautifully told in a video entitled Keeping It Alive: The AIHEC Cultural Learning Centers Initiative. In that video, W. Richard West (Southern Cheyenne), director of the National Museum of the American Indian of the Smithsonian Institution, tells why the Smithsonian partnered with the tribal colleges.

"The maintenance of culture takes place where Indian people live, and that's in communities," he says. As the director of the National Museum of the American Indian, he wanted to support institutions that maintain culture locally. The tribal colleges and universities fit.

As the building has progressed over the years, Gail Bruce's dream has metamorphosed into 30 different centers, each adapted by the tribal college to meet its community's needs. Art and photography shows can now be displayed in reservation communities. For example, Little Big Horn College (Crow Agency, MT) recently brought a visiting exhibit with historic photos of Crow people taken by Richard Throssel, which reportedly had never been shown in Montana before. Bay Mills Community College (Brimley, MI) and Sinte Gleska University (Rosebud, SD) both received significant art collections to display in their centers, which might otherwise have not been donated.

Several utilize their centers for language and culture classes. Traditional arts such as carving and basket weaving are taught at Northwest Indian College's (Bellingham, WA) center, and the Institute of American Indian Arts (Santa Fe, NM) holds cultural events such as dances. When its center opens next year, Fort Belknap College (Harlem, MT) will have a language immersion school in addition to Native American Studies offices, classrooms, and a language lab.

Several colleges combine classrooms and offices with art displays in their centers. At Oglala Lakota College (Kyle, SD), for example, the center hosts Lakota Studies and Graduate Studies Departments, historical photos, and paintings. Veterans find a special place of honor at some of the centers. Eight now have or plan to have gift shops, including Fort Peck Community College (Poplar, MT).

Although few want to invest in the climate controls necessary for preserving artifacts, Haskell Indian Nations University and Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College are investigating "digital repatriation," which would make it possible for center visitors to see collections via computer at museums around the world.

CULTURAL DEDICATION. Chief Dull Knife College's dedication ceremony for its cultural learning center included (left to right) Alfred Seminole, Burton Seminole, Conrad Fisher, Leroy Pine, Daniel Pine, Larry MedicineBull, and C. J. LittleCoyote. Photo by Kyle Brehm/courtesy of the American Indian College Fund.

TELLING A CROW STORY. From 1902 to 1911, Richard Throssel took photos of Crow people. In August 2003, because Little Big Horn College had a place to display them, the photos came back to Montana. Pictured is Dean Bear Claw. Photo by Douglas Kuhlman.

Where the Water Stops

In the two years since the cultural learning center at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College in Cloquet, MN opened its doors, it has attracted visitors from Europe and Africa as well as museum personnel from across the nation.

The bottom floor of the building (2,500 square feet) houses the museum, and the loft houses a photo lab, classroom, and veterans committee meeting space. "Our museum tells the story of the Fond du Lac people from our creation, to our migration from the east, until we came to settle at this place called Nah-Gah-Chi-Wah-Nong (Where the Water Stops)," museum archivist Mike Peacock (Anishinabe) said. The museum also portrays home life, education, and religion.

STORY OF CREATION. The Fond du Lac Cultural Learning Center tells the story of the people from the time of their creation until present day. Photo by Steve Shotley.

Since the center opened in July 2001, the college has hosted two museum practices workshops in partnership with the Science Museum of Minnesota and the National Museum of the American Indian. These intensive, two-week professional courses taught tribal colleges how to operate a museum, and they covered topics like conservation, museum collections management, artifacts preservation, exhibit design, and exhibit pest control. AIHEC is working with NMAI to develop other collaborative training for tribal college cultural centers.

Fond du Lac community workshops have included traditional quillwork, black ash basketry, and traditional moccasin making. To make the collection accessible beyond the community, the museum has begun to digitize and display on its website interactive movies about artifacts and Ojibwe clothing, documents including the original allotment rolls, more than a dozen old photograph collections, and other arts and crafts. The website is www.fdlrez.com/Museum/index.htm. As the technology advances, holographic photography showing a three-dimensional image will also be possible. The digital museum will also provide storytelling sessions. Because of cultural sensitivities, some stories may only be available online during certain seasons of the year.

The center has instilled pride in local people. "The community really appreciates having something here that tells our story," Peacock said. It has also increased cultural understanding in the larger Minnesota community, according to Kristine Shotley (Anishinabe), museum technical assistant. She has been impressed by the respect that visitors have shown for the Ojibwe culture. "No one leaves this place without learning something new. I make sure of that," she said.

Omaeqnomenewak Pematesenewak

The College of Menominee Nation calls its Cultural Learning Center Omaeqnomenewak Pematesenewak, which means the Menominee Way of Life. Since opening the building in 2001, the college has used it for a variety of college, community, and statewide events related to the way of life. The center helps to preserve and revitalize Menominee culture, language, and spirituality, according to the college. It is not used as a museum; the tribe is raising funds to build a tribal museum.

Prior to 2001, community events had to be shoe horned into small buildings, according to Alan Caldwell, a Menominee tribal member who directs the learning center. Now the college can host large gatherings, such as college graduations, faculty/staff meetings, luncheons for visiting dignitaries, community meetings, blood drives, and tribal candidate forums. The college also plans to use the center for local Indian artists exhibits and displays.

The white cedar-paneled open area of the ground floor helps attract people to the college's noon time gatherings, "brownbag lunches." One week after September 11, 2001, a faculty member from Algeria talked about a Muslim's response to 9/11. At Christmas one year, students from the tribal school sang carols in the Menominee language. Other brownbag topics have been the traditional Menominee sturgeon ceremony, prescribed burns, and a presentation by Caldwell on the Medicine Wheel Circle of life.

The college, located on a wooded reservation 50 miles northwest of Green Bay, WI, has provided its learning center space for statewide and regional events. Last year, it hosted the pow wow for the Wisconsin Chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America. Last summer, the college helped 65 educators from around the region to meet Wisconsin curriculum requirements through attendance at the week-long American Indian Studies Summer Teacher Institute, which the college has held for seven years. By Wisconsin law, all public schools and teacher training programs must include the study of the history, culture, and sovereignty of the six federally recognized tribes of Wisconsin.

Although most colleges use their centers for Native studies and cultural arts, the Menominee are the only ones to provide a language recording and listening lab there. This project is close to Caldwell's heart, and he plans to increase its size when the college expands into the basement of the building, doubling the center's floor space to 6,000 square feet. The college website features the center, www.menominee.edu.

Haskell Center for Healing

Haskell Indian Nations University, located just west of Kansas City in Lawrence, KS, holds a special place in the tribal college community as well as in Native American history. Haskell was founded as the second American government boarding school in 1884 and is the only school of that era to survive and go on to become a university, serving all Native Americans. Once a center to remove all traces of tribal identity, Haskell now is a center for advanced academic study and cultural preservation.

The Haskell Cultural Center and Museum is dedicated to earlier students of Haskell in order to help heal the legacy of the boarding school era. It also serves as a national center for the study of living American Indian traditions. The museum provides both present day and historical information about North American indigenous people through exhibits, educational programs, and research. It uses the sacred circle as a foundation for its philosophy.

The archivist at the Haskell Cultural Center and Museum assists Code Talkers in the research room.

The unique architecture of the 6,000 square foot building also speaks to healing. Museum archivist/curator Bobbi Rahder said, "The front area of our building (the entry plaza) is a place for people to cleanse of any negative energy or anger over the past. As you walk into the building through a wooden portico area, your eye is drawn upward to the sky to thank the Creator before entering the building. We emphasized the traditional circle and the four directions as we designed the display area and other architectural features." Outside is a garden of medicinal plants, which serves as a living laboratory for traditional indigenous knowledge.

A world-class museum, it provides a home for some 2,000 artifacts as well as over 1 million linear feet of archival records and photographs. The Frank A. Reinhart collection of 809 glass plate negatives is part of the archives. The museum's 5,000 square foot display area has collections reaching back into the 19th century. Unlike most of the cultural centers, Haskell has the temperature and humidity controlled storage space necessary for the preservation of certain types of collections.

Since opening its doors to the public in September 2002, the Haskell museum has hosted groups of young students and their teachers from local schools. "We want the children to understand Native culture as a living and vibrant society," said curator Rahder. The university website, www.haskell.edu, provides a link to the cultural center.

Spirit of the Plains

Before the Spirit of the Plains Cultural Interpretive Center was built in 2002, much of the art produced by United Tribes Technical College (UTTC) students was kept wrapped up in a storage space on the campus in Bismarck, ND. Now their art is tastefully displayed in the 2,600 square foot facility, which serves as an art gallery, interpretive center, and as a classroom. School groups, visitors, and UTTC students can arrange for tours by appointment, but the center is not open to the general public at this time.

ON DISPLAY. Before the Spirit of the Plains Cultural Interpretive Center was built in 2002, much of the art produced by United Tribes Technical College students was kept wrapped up in storage.

The Tribal Tourism Partnership Initiative is housed in the basement of the center. Initiative Director Karen Paetz (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara) said the facility helped the college secure funding to initiate the tribal tourism curriculum. "This vocation prepares individuals to articulate history from the Native American perspective," Paetz said. The upstairs area now becomes not only an art gallery but also an on-site training classroom. "Our student interns can actually conduct the tours themselves." The college offers a two-year tourism program as well as a nine-month certificate.

UTTC is located on the Lewis and Clark Trail. The Spirit of the Plains Center is working with state tourism officials on the bicentennial commemoration, hoping to open to the public in spring 2004 and tell the story of Lewis and Clark from a tribal perspective. The center staff also plans a retail sales center for artwork, Native art materials, educational resources, and Native-theme gifts.

Future

The future of the Cultural Learning Centers is bright. Acclaimed author N. Scott Momaday, Kiowa, sums it up in the Keeping It Alive video when he says, "The most important question you can be asked is, 'Who are you?' If you have the answer to that, or a fair beginning of an answer, you're on the right track." Cultural preservation and learning is one of the ways to know who we are. The Cultural Learning Centers are beginning to provide a home for the answers to that question.

Richard Simonelli holds a master's degree in electronic engineering from Cornell University. He is a freelance writer allied with Native American issues in healing, traditional knowledge, and education. He can be reached at richsimone@aol.com. For more information about the history of the Cultural Learning Centers, see TCJ, Vol.14, N.2.