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Taking a step into native history
New American Indian exhibit guides public through cultural past
By Ruthanne Johnson
rjohn180@mscd.edu

Photo by Jason Small • jsmall4@mscd.edu The teepee cutaway shows what the inside of a Native American home might have looked like at the Tribal Paths: Colorado’s American Indians, 1500 to Today exhibit at the Colorado History Museum. The exhibit was a sequel to a previous exhibit and completes the story of Colorado American Indian history.

About a mile east of the land where the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians camped along the Platte River in the 1800s, the Colorado History Museum held an opening celebration for their new American Indian exhibit.

The exhibit, Tribal Paths: Colorado’s American Indians, 1500 to Today, picks up where Ancient Voices: Stories of Colorado’s Distant Past left off, representing the more recent stories of Colorado’s American Indians. Combined, the two exhibits span the lives of Colorado’s native community from 10,000 years ago to today.

The opening ceremonies began at 10 a.m. on Jan. 19 and continued through noon with a crowd of people filling the large hall just in front of the exhibit’s entrance.

“I think this is the biggest crowd we’ve had for an opening,” said museum security guard S. Vernell Crump, adding that the museum staff has worked hard on this project for the past five years.

A procession of representatives of Cheyenne, Ute, Arapaho, Sioux and Navajo communities marked the opening of the ceremonies, followed by a traditional Native American invocation in English and Lakota Sioux to honor ancestors who survived hardships. Several tribal elders spoke in honor of their ancestors and in appreciation of the Colorado History Museum for telling the story of their people.

Manuel Heart, chairman of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe of western Colorado, spoke of Native American hardships such as the Sand Creek Massacre, boarding school experiences and assimilation practices in Colorado during the twentieth century.

“Forty-seven tribes were exiled from their lands in Colorado through events such as the Homestead Act and gold rush – the Ute in the mountains, the Cheyenne, Sioux and Arapaho on the plains,” Heart said. “Then there were the boarding schools, the assimilation and the churches which took our native religion away.”

Heart said that some of the elders in attendance were direct descendents of those killed in Colorado’s Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and that the exhibit was important for them to heal.

“As you go through the exhibit, I want you to feel empathy with the tribes, to put yourself there and see what they went through,” he told the audience.

Kori M. Guy, a Metro political science professor, attended the opening in honor of her Navajo and Cherokee heritage. The boarding school exhibit brought a memory of her grandmother rescuing her from a boarding school somewhere in Michigan when she was only four.

“When I saw those beds all lined up, I remembered. And then I noticed a large space around the display. Most of the other native visitors glanced in and walked quickly past,” she said, adding that although the display was difficult, it represented an important part of Native American history.

The exhibit initially takes patrons to a gallery where a series of historic photographs of American Indians representing the 47 tribes with ancestral ties to Colorado flash on a wall screen.

Viewers continue through galleries illustrating American Indian life prior to contact with explorers and settlers, the cooperation and conflict between American Indians and explorers, trappers and settlers, the tragedy of the Sand Creek Massacre, in which more than 200 American Indians and U.S. soldiers were killed, and government policies on Indian removal to reservations.

The last part of the exhibit shows American Indians living in contemporary society, touches on civil rights issues and shows the Sand Creek Massacre Healing Run.

“The exhibit is important to our community, and I especially loved the video of young people doing the Sand Creek Healing Run,” Guy said of the last gallery. “It is like a replica or our oral tradition and important in our healing.”