MUSEUM OF INDIAN ARTS AND CULTURE

Learn About Corn, Measure A Buffalo

Museum Activity Kits

The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture offers an array of fun activities inspired by nature and various aspects of tribal life.

One fun activity (which may also be challenging for adults) involves identifying the different parts of a full-sized corn plant. Can you find the ear, leaf, brace roots, silk, soil level, tassel, nodal roots and stalk?

Kids might also try their hand at an activity centered on the buffalo. Using a measuring tape, measure out the height of a buffalo—6 feet and 5 inches—on the floor and mark it. Now see who comes closest to the correct height. Students can also research the two types of buffalo. What are their similarities and differences? What are four uses the Apache tribes have for the buffalo?

Find these and more activities and lesson plans at: museumfoundation.org/education Activity kits for all Museum of New Mexico divisions are generously sponsored by $10,000 in private gifts through the Museum of New Mexico Foundation. The funds help create specialized activities for thousands of schoolchildren across New Mexico.

Reading Summer

Literacy Program Takes the Museum to the Tribes

When San Felipe Pueblo Education/Library Manager Tracey Charlie was facing a pandemic year with no public feast days or gatherings, she worried about a loss of community connections.

But this summer, a grant to tribal libraries filled the emptiness at San Felipe with a series of vibrant, out-of-the-box cultural literacy programs.

The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture’s Tribal Libraries Summer Reading Program kicked off in 2015. The program has thrived, thanks in part to support from The Ludwig and Nancy Sternberger Charitable Foundation.

The project’s original goal was to support literacy and resource development at Acoma, Cochiti, Jemez, Laguna, Ohkay Owingeh, San Ildefonso, Sandia, Santa Clara, Santo Domingo, Tesuque and Zuni Pueblos.

“It was originally organized to bring students to the museum to visit exhibits and engage in interactive workshops on culture and history,” says museum deputy director Matthew Martinez. “2020 presented a challenge where we were not able to host students and book school groups. We were able to redirect the Sternberger money in creative ways to develop outreach and curriculum and literacy projects for tribal libraries on-site.”

Instead of bringing students to the museum, the museum went to the pueblos. A Zoom lecture series focused on Native writers featured Navajo children’s book author Daniel W. Vandever and Dr. Debbie Reese, a Nambé Pueblo scholar and founder of American Indians in Children’s Literature.

“Reese is very good about working with teachers to understand context and bring attention to stereotypes in popular mainstream writings,” Martinez says.

Working with Red Planet Books in Albuquerque, the museum generated a list of Native-authored books broken down into three educational categories: K-3rd grade, upper elementary and high school.

“That list has been very valuable,” Martinez says. “We received about 200 books, divided and shared with tribal libraries, to continue this theme of literacy and community engagement.”

At San Felipe, Charlie devised another way to use grant funds to bolster the isolated students. Working with the museum, she created four cultural activity kits (see sidebar) for families to pick up from the library. These included a traditional Pueblo embroidery kit with supplies and instructions imparted via Zoom, as well as cooking kits for students to learn to make red and blue corn tortillas, feast day pies and cookies.

“We really wanted to provide the sense of community teaching and togetherness that happens during special times like feast,” says Charlie.

For another activity, San Felipe artist Michael Tenorio realized his longtime dream of creating a coloring book about what it means to be a San Felipe tribal member. The coloring book has been a hit, with a community signing and two separate distributions.

The response to the kits was “tremendous,” Charlie says. “Grandma would get involved, Grandpa, aunties, uncles and so on. It was fun to hear the little remarks when they’d come to get the next kit. During this pandemic, it was a lot of quiet time for most tribes, but this has brought a sense of normalcy and lifted spirits.”

For Martinez, the feat of stretching the summer reading program into an entire year of educational programming has been inspiring. “We would love to see it continue in some form throughout the year,” he says. “I think books are a good way to start. There’s a vast body of work by Native authors. A lot of those authors are really open to talking to students.”

That prospect opens the door to future private funding opportunities for author stipends and books. Support will also continue to be needed for more cultural actvity kits, even in a post-pandemic world.

“We want to see what other communities come up with, given the resources,” Martinez says.

To support the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, contact Lauren Paige at Lauren@museumfoundation.org or 505.982.2282.

Above: Cover of a coloring book by San Felipe artist Michael Tenorio, distributed through the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture’s Tribal Libraries Summer Reading Program. Photo courtesy Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.