National Museum of the American Indian

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• Learn more about American history, American Indians, archaeology, auditory learners, Caribbean, crafts, culture, fine art, folk arts, literature, museum learning, North America, photography, South America, visual learners, world history, and writing.

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The National Museum of the American Indian offers a variety of online exhibitions at their site. These visually appealing exhibitions feature photographs of people, artwork and artifacts, along with textual information, and video clips of artists and historians. The exhibitions are interactive, allowing users to zoom in on many of the images and move through the information in a variety of ways. Some of the exhibitions are available in Spanish and English, particularly those that deal with Mexican art and folk art.

Currently, the site offers one excellent online resource specifically for educators, and hopefully there will be more to come. This resource uses a Flash presentation of text, images, video, and audio to teach about the codetalkers of WWI and WWII. The resource comes with with lesson plans and suggested assigments.

NMAI’s current holdings have their foundation in the collections of the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation of New York City, assembled largely by George Gustav Heye (1874-1957). The NMAI has one of the most extensive collections of Native American arts and artifacts in the world with more than 266,000 catalog records (representing 825,000 items) spanning over 12,000 years of history and over 1,200 historic and contemporary indigenous cultures and over 300 archaeological cultures throughout the Americas. The Object collections, consisting of Archaeology, Ethnology, and Modern and Contemporary Arts, include all major culture areas of the Western Hemisphere and virtually all tribes in the United States, most of those of Canada, and a significant number from Middle and South America and the Caribbean. Approximately 68% of the object collections originate in the United States, with 3.5% from Canada, 10% from Mexico and Central America, 11% from South America, and 6% from the Caribbean. Overall, 55% of the collection is archaeological, 42% ethnographic, and 3% modern and contemporary arts.The Museum’s holdings also include the Photographic Archives (approximately 324,000 images from the 1860s to the present), the Media Archives (approximately 12,000 items) including film and audiovisual collections such as wax cylinders, phonograph discs, 16mm and 35mm motion picture film, magnetic media of many varieties, and optical and digital media recorded from the late 1800s through the present, and the Paper Archives (approximately 1522 linear feet) comprised of records dating from the 1860s to the present that preserve the documentary history of the NMAI, its predecessor, the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation (MAI), and their collections as well as other documentary and archival materials.