The Inuit are a Native American people whose homelands are in the Canadian Arctic. A special exhibit at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane, Washington, featured The Inuit Art of Povungnituk. Povungnituk is a village on the eastern shores of Hudson Bay in Arctic Quebec. This artwork provides some insights into the … Continued
In providing a broad overview of the hundreds of distinct American Indian cultures found in North America, it is common for museums, historians, archaeologists, and ethnologists to use a culture area model. This model is based on the observation that different groups of people living in the same geographic area often share many cultural features. … Continued
The High Desert Museum, located just south of Bend, Oregon, has a large gallery devoted to Plateau Indians. The Plateau Culture Area is the area between the Cascade Mountains and the Rocky Mountains in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, British Columbia, and Western Montana. From north to south it runs from the Fraser River in the north … Continued
The Plateau Culture Area is the area between the Cascade Mountains and the Rocky Mountains in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, British Columbia, and Western Montana. From north to south it runs from the Fraser River in the north to the Blue Mountains in the south. Much of the area is classified as semi-arid. Part of it … Continued
The Cahuilla Continuum was an exhibit at the Riverside Metropolitan Museum in Riverside, California, authored and curated by Sean C. Milanovich. The exhibit told the story of the Cahuilla from creation to the present day. One of the displays in the exhibit shows modern Cahuilla ceremonial clothing and regalia. Shown above is the display of … Continued
In major museums, only a small fraction of the artifacts held by the museum are on display and interpreted for the public. Most of the museum’s artifacts are in vaults where they are available only to researchers. The Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History maintains a Visible Vault in which visitors can view hundreds … Continued
The San Bernardino County Museum in Redlands, California has a display of ancient artifacts from Central America: the countries south of Mexico and north of South America. From an archaeological perspective, Central America is also called the Mesoamerican Frontier and the Southern Maya Periphery. In her entry on Central America in The Oxford Companion to … Continued
The Pueblos are the village agriculturists of New Mexico and Northern Arizona. While the Pueblos are usually lumped together in both the anthropological and historical writings as though they are a single cultural group, they are linguistically and culturally divergent. The Pueblos speak six mutually unintelligible languages and occupy more than 30 villages in a … Continued
In general, California Indians have been classified as hunters and gatherers, meaning that they tended to obtain food from hunting and from gathering wild plants. Subsistence patterns—how people obtained the calories which are needed to sustain life—are determined, in part, by the environment and the resources within that environment. The Cahuilla homeland in California was … Continued
The aboriginal Pomo territory was about 50 miles north of present-day San Francisco. Pomo territory included the Pacific Coast and extended some distance inland as far as Clear Lake. Like other California tribes, they lived in small villages. There was no single Pomo tribe, rather, the designation “Pomo” groups together about 72 independent tribes. Some … Continued
