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Native American culture
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George Gustav Heye Center - The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian is a fascinating building at the Bowling Green area of Lower Manhattan. It’s close to Battery Park that displays an elegant view of the water. You can see ferries floating by headed towards Staten Island, since South Ferry Terminal is nearby. It allows you to appreciate the hidden gems of the city located in the outskirts Manhattan. One of those very treasures is the museum mentioned previously.
The Museum of the American Indian is directly in front of the Bowling Green Park with a water fountain at the center. From the park view you can see the front of the museum. It has stone steps with statues on the sides. Walking in to the museum up the grand stairs led me to the entrance protected by security with metal detectors. Out of the various museums I’ve previously visited in NYC this was the first time I’ve encountered going through metal detectors, maybe because the museum is free and open to the public?
From that point on there’s a digital interactive guide that displays the layout of the museum and location of the exhibits. The museum is divided into quadrants with an elliptical rotunda in the middle. The rotunda is illuminated by natural light from the glass dome with skylights above you. Also when you look up you can see extraordinary symbolic painting on the ceiling. From the center of the rotunda you can go left or right to see the exhibits of Native Americans. For some reason I felt like going in through the left, aside from the fact that the right side was closed for renovations. I headed left into the “Time Exposure” exhibit by the Haudenosaunee Discovery Room. When entering the exhibit it can seem a bit disoriented, but you just have...
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...due to the external forces such as other settlers e.g. the Navajos, new settlers along with the Spanish conquerors entered their world. As a result the Pueblo Indians were imposed by these external forces especially through military power that changed their ways completely; having minimal cultural practices of their ancestors before them. The museum may seem like it’s very limited to what’s on exhibit mostly because not all of the building is in use. However the few exhibits they have is substantial in sparking an interest or even beginning to understand the cultures of Native Americans.
Works Cited
http://nmai.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/item/194
http://newsdesk.si.edu/releases/exhibition-smithsonian-documents-impact-railroads-native-southwest
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/482769/Pueblo-Indians
http://www.bigorrin.org/pueblo_kids.htm
For my ethnography project, I decided to observe Native American culture. More specifically, I decided to observe Native American powwows, and how they unite the different tribes participating from across the country and how they unite people within a tribe. Powwows are an event where Native American people gather to sing, dance, participate in contests, have food, and ultimately bond with one another throughout the occasion. The powwow that I attended was Utah State University’s 44th annual powwow, which occurred on Saturday March 4, 2017 at noon. In order to learn more about the powwow from an insider’s perspective, I talked to a girl who looked to be a young adult, and participated in the dancing throughout the event. Although
First I visited the Environment Floor. This was my least favorite of all the floors. The first exhibit I looked at was called ?The Estuary.? This had many different tanks filled with fish that normally dwell in the lower Hudson River. Next I visited the solar telescope. I walked inside what the Science Center calls their lighthouse, and found that they have an actual solar telescope mounted on their roof. From this telescope I saw images of the sun?s surface. The next exhibit I visited was call the Bug Zoo, unfortunately I didn?t stay there long. It was filled with tanks holding cockroaches, millipedes, and even honeybees, along with a small greenhouse. I was very uncomfortable there. I then visited The Rock Wall. Here they asked me to try to climb a wall, just like professional rock climbers do. It?s a lot h...
Pueblo Indian. (2002, April). History of the pueblo indians (cont.). Retrieved March 12, 2003, from http://www.puebloindian.com/pueblo_history_003.htm
On my trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I decided to take my mother with me. While being in the museum, I decided to focus on “The American Wing”. In “The American Wing”, there are amazing pieces of art, jewelry, and antique silver. I was amazed on how each piece of artwork and item was carefully designed. They had an amazing design that you do not see now in days.
Considering historical evidence, the notion: Native –Americans was not the first inhabitant of America is a complete false. For centuries, history kept accurate and vivid accounts of the first set of people who domiciled the western hemisphere. Judging by those records, below are the first set of Native-American people who inhabited America before the arrival of another human race; the Iroquois: The Iroquois of Native Americans was one of the tribes that lived in America before other people came. Based on historical evidence, it is believed that the Native Americans came from Asia way back during the Ice Age through a land bridge of the Bering Strait. When the Europeans first set foot in America, there were about 10 million Native Americans
In August of the year 1680, around present day New Mexico, the Pueblo Indians had begun an uprising against Spanish colonists which resulted in the death of over 400 Spanish. The remaining 2,000 settlers were driven out of the area. The reason for this war was due to the constant oppression and violent treatment of Pueblo by Spanish colonists. For nearly 100 years, starting in 1540, the Pueblo Indians were subjected to successive waves of soldiers, missionaries, and settlers. There was much conflict between the Pueblo and the Spanish due to differences in religion and culture. The most important cause of the Pueblo Revolt was because the Spanish attempted to destroy their religion, banning traditional dances and religious icons. Today we will cover the Pueblo Revolt and why it is an important chapter in American history. (Wikipedia.org)
The Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act was signed into law on November 1990 by President George Bush. This legislation is the result of decades of effort by American Indians to protect the burial sites of their ancestors against grave desecration and to recover the remains of ancestors and sacred cultural objects in the possession or under the control of federal agencies and museums. In November 1993, museums holding certain Native American artifacts were required to prepare written summaries of their collections for distribution to culturally affiliated tribes. In November 1995, museums were required to prepare detailed inventories of their Native American collection. This act is historically significant because it represents a fundamental change in social attitudes toward Native people by museum curators, the scientific community, and Congress. Congress attempted to strike a balance between the interest in scientific examination of skeletal remains and the recognition that Native Americans have a religious and spiritual reverence for the remains of their ancestors (4).
The museum I attended was “National Museum of the American Indian” (The George Gustav Heye Center.) This historical center offered a superlative perspective of the social legacy of the Native Americas. There were displays that present famous items chose for their aesthetic quality and power as emblems of Native beliefs. My experience in this museum was very quiet and lonely, but I made the best out of it. When first entering the museum, I was lost as to how I would be able to connect any of the information to this class. It took me a while to get an understanding of how the information I collected could be relevant to this class. The concepts and theories I will be using to analyze my museum visit is race and ethnicity, commodification, theory of domination, and hegemony. The authors I will be using are Stephen Steinberg, Vine Deloria, Jr., Charles Fruehling Springwood, C Richard King, Harry Kitano, Nathan Glazer and Ronald Takaki.
The African American Firefighter museum is now considered the only African American Firefighter museum in the whole United States. That really got my attention to write my essay about this unique museum. As I used to live in Egypt before living here, I visited a lot of museums there, and I really liked them. That made me curious to know more about museums here. When I searched the internet for the museums, the African American Firefighter museum was one of the most standing ones in the United States. It is located in Los Angeles city in South Central Avenue. The museum was formed at one of the historic fire stations at which some firefighters were segregated, instead of the fire station number 30.The museum is composed of more than 1 floor
Nevertheless, in the author’s note, Dunbar-Ortiz promises to provide a unique perspective that she did not gain from secondary texts, sources, or even her own formal education but rather from outside the academy. Furthermore, in her introduction, she claims her work to “be a history of the United States from an Indigenous peoples’ perspective but there is no such thing as a collective Indigenous peoples’ perspective (13).” She states in the next paragraph that her focus is to discuss the colonist settler state, but the previous statement raises flags for how and why she attempts to write it through an Indigenous perspective. Dunbar-Ortiz appears to anchor herself in this Indian identity but at the same time raises question about Indigenous perspective. Dunbar-Ortiz must be careful not to assume that just because her mother was “most likely Cherokee,” her voice automatically resonates and serves as an Indigenous perspective. These confusing and contradictory statements do raise interesting questions about Indigenous identity that Dunbar-Ortiz should have further examined. Are
...e to preserve traditional culture as well as be a part of modern culture is discussed within the exhibit. We can see this struggle in a scene depicted in the exhibit of women weaving in a modern home with a traditional room, while the men sit on the couch and read comic books. We see the melding together of tradition and modernization. Traditions like weaving and pastoral life in the Diné home serve as a teaching tool to remind young people where they come from and who they are as Diné people. It shows them how to be Diné in a colonized world. While maintaining tradition had become difficult at points in their journey, Diné persevered and adapted to change while maintaining tradition. They remain one of the largest groups of indigenous peoples in the Southwest today.
As I walk into the museum onto the first level, there are many different halls surrounding. To my left there is the African mammal exhibit. There are so many different creatures displayed, ranging from desert to rainforest. Some of the animals that are displayed are the Arabian Oryx, Savanna Elephant, Spotted Hyena, Hippopotamus and Okapi. When you browse there exhibits you are able to study and learn detail information. I learned that due to human encroachm...
To my belief keeping the long view by Blight meant to keep in mind the struggle of the UGRR movement and people involved and never fall back in the shackles of racism. Learning and studying UGRR should mean keep in mind always the ethical and moral values and treat each other with equality and respect regardless of religion, race or color. The real lesson Blight wants us to understand by keeping long view is to be tolerant, open minded and ethical all thorough our lives.
My trip to the Getty museum was filled with anticipation and an unknowing of what Iwas actually searching to write about. I went on a Friday at about eleven but the museum was still full. It took about twenty minutes to find parking, the wait in line was long, and the tram had so many people it felt even hotter then it actually was. But overall the experience was fun. I enjoyed checking out the works of art and watching the classes of elementary students learn about the history and culture in the room. On one occasion I was very surprised because a mother asked her daughter, who could not have been more than six, about a painting was which she correctly identified as Vincent Van Gogh’s Irises, which was great because I never knew about Van Gogh at her age.
My visit to this Museum got my skin with goose bumps from the excitement of entering an awesome place that has lots of history, information, and exhibits from my culture and roots. I was enjoying every moment by walking around all those displays, and seeing how everything started here on this side of the border.