MEMORIES .................
Jose and Marty Kriepe de Montano.
ent instruments from South America, and then we would talk about that. It really gave people a glimpse of the diversity of cultures. We would get the funniest questions. We
would talk about giving thanks to Mother Nature and growing potatoes. And a little boy raised his hand and said, “How do you grow a potato?” Kids think potatoes were cloned in the grocery store. They really don’t know. They’re in New York City. When I worked at the Resource Center at
NMAI-New York, we had a whole collection of lesson plans put together by Native people for students. People would come in and we could help them teach an appropriate lesson. Teachers would come in and want to know about Indian language. When you tell them that there were over 300 languages north of Mexico, they’re like “Really?!” They didn’t have any idea. In 2000, I moved to Maryland to plan the
MARTY KREIPE DE MONTANO
(PRAIRIE BAND POTAWATOMI) I
came to the museum in 1983 on a fellowship. I worked in every department for nine months. When that was over, the person who was running the Indian In- formation Center (Nancy Henry)
was leaving and they offered me her position. The Information Center had been there since about 1976. At our 155th
Street and Broadway location,
the Information Center was in a room right by the front door. I had maybe just 100 books or so. Mostly, I would answer questions such as “What is that thing on the third floor? There’s no label.” In those days, we didn’t have many labels. I had copies of drawings of every case, and the cases were all numbered. My role was to talk to the public, and I realized quickly that people knew very little about Native peoples. I was there to answer people’s questions about the exhibits, the museum and Indians in general, and I started keeping track of the questions. I have many notebooks full of these questions. I also soon realized that people get a more satisfying visit if they can talk to somebody who’s knowledgeable. When the Smithsonian took over, it was
really different. We had budgets. I changed the name at that point from the Indian Informa-
62 AMERICAN INDIAN SPRING 2017
tion Center to the Resource Center. I thought the Information Center sounded like I had the information and was going to give it to you. The Resource Center was where you could come in and we had the resources where you could find the answer. It was meant for the general pub- lic – for people who had been to Arizona and bought a Hopi pot and wanted to see what we had in our collection that could be similar to theirs. Graduate students working dissertations and those working on master’s theses also came. It ran the gamut. On weekends, the Museum would put on
programs. My husband José Montaño and I put together an activity where you could make pan pipes out of plastic straws, and they worked! He could teach people how to play them. It’s not just a musical thing. In order to play them, the scale alternates between two parts. One part is played by one person and the other is played by someone else. So coopera- tion is more important than competition. We also had a program called Intertwined Roots around 1985 and we talked about powwows in North America and the meaning behind the dances and the things that the people were wearing: the significance of those things. Then José would come out and play about six differ-
Resource Center at the Museum in Washing- ton, D.C., on the Mall, we had about 15 com- puters and people could watch and listen with headsets. There was a section where there were beautiful photographs of objects in the collec- tion. They could choose one of those images and send it via email as a postcard. We had an online service where you could research by topic and email yourself the articles. One day a doctor with the Indian Health Service came in asking if anything had been done in any other areas about going back to traditional food and taking things like pizza and soda out of the kids’ meals in school. I showed him this online service and he found a bunch of articles where different Native people had gone back to traditional foods to improve their health. You never know! Every year, there was some kind of conven-
tion or meeting in D.C. for people that were blind. All of a sudden, there were a lot of blind people walking around the Museum. They would visit the Resource Center, and I would let them touch our handling objects – a beaver pelt or painted deer hide, for example, and I would describe it to them. They could feel the rough paint of the deer hide, and I would help guide their hand over it. They could feel the beadwork too. Those were some of the things we had in the handling collection to make people aware that Native people are still here and making beautiful things. I think it was es- pecially appealing to the blind. I had the particular pleasure, I guess, in
making people see things from a different perspective. X
PHOTO BY KATHERINE FOGDEN
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