ENJOY ART
Indian Arts in the Park
R YA N D O R G A N
Grand Teton National Park’s Colter Bay Indian Artist Museum closed a decade ago, but the park still hosts the American Indian Guest Artist Program and displays portions of the museum’s collection at the Colter Bay and Craig Thomas Visitor Centers. // BY DINA MISHEV
An exhibit featuring pieces of Native American artwork from the David T. Vernon collection and the private collection of Laine Thom is on display at the Colter Bay Visitor Center and the Craig Thomas Discovery and Visitor Center until October 2021.
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here are twenty-four Native American tribes associated with Grand Teton National Park (GTNP), from the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma to the Eastern Shoshone Tribe and the Northern Arapahoe Tribe, both of the Wind River Reservation, Wyoming, and the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of the Fort Hall Reservation, Idaho. These tribes are tied to the lands that are today GTNP for a variety of reasons—some having seasonally lived and hunted here— and others passing through the area as they were forced from their ancestral lands onto reservations by the U.S. government. “It is —BRIDGETTE GUILD, GTNP MUSEUM CURATOR important that we understand the relationship between Native Americans and this land,” says Bridgette Guild, GTNP museum curator.
It is important that we " understand the relationship
between Native Americans and this land.”
F
or four decades, GTNP was home to the Colter Bay Indian Arts Museum, which displayed the David T. Vernon Collection, a world-class assemblage that included art and artifacts from one hundred tribes. That muse-
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SUMMER 2021 | JACKSON HOLE
um was closed in 2011 so the collection, half of which had been on continuous display since the museum opened in 1972, could be conserved. This meticulous conservation work was finished in 2020, but, to ensure the collection’s long-term preservation, now only about one hundred items from it at a time are displayed. (The rest are in storage.) The current exhibit, Living Traditions, Reflections on the Past at Colter Bay, is divided between the Colter Bay Visitor Center and the Craig Thomas Discovery and Visitor Center. It includes thirty-one items from the Vernon Collection and forty-seven items on loan from the private collection of Laine Thom, a former park ranger (interpretation) of Shoshone, Goshute, and Paiute descent, and an artist. “For me to loan pieces to the park was to allow people to interpret the culture’s past, present, and future,” says Thom. Living Traditions will be on display through this summer, although access could be limited due to Covid-19. Colter Bay is also home to the longrunning American Indian Guest Artist Program, which allows Native artists to demonstrate, talk about, and sell their work over week-long residencies from late May through mid September.