Alana ’27 is working to preserve and honor Indigenous culture through the restoration and curation of a Pueblo Indian exhibit, a project inspired by her eye-opening trip to the Navajo Nation and driven by a deepening understanding of the connection between Native communities, their land, and their history.
In June of 2024 I took a two-week trip to the Southwestern United States and specifically the Navajo Nation, which has the largest reservation of any tribe in the country and a language that created an unbreakable code instrumental in our victory in World War II. However, upon arriving I was struck by the extreme poverty that ravaged the land and its inhabitants, and as I heard the stories of tribal members and elders I met along the way, I became increasingly aware of just how much the nation had changed in recent years. During the pandemic, COVID-19 swept the nation and in mercilessly taking the lives of countless elders, took the cultural and linguistic knowledge they carried as well. The waning of Navajo culture is felt by all its members. And the sense of being ‘lost’ on your own land is affecting not only the Navajo Nation but Indigenous groups across the country and in conversing with my own tribal relatives and other native communities I realized the exigence of cultural alienation.
In August of that same summer, I began interning at the Institute for American Indian studies where I decided to try my hand at restoration work and was presented with trays and trays of small clay figurines that needed some serious TLC. The collection of dolls was donated to the museum many years ago but remained untouched because they needed to find someone with the right skills equipped for the project. The research center decided that I was a good fit, and I was able to completely restore several dolls before the summer ended and agreed to return next summer and specifically devote my time towards assembling an exhibit that would display the figurines. The Navajo and the Pueblo are different tribes, but the problem I identified during my time in the Southwest became the foundation of my work with the museum.
Since beginning my CSGC Summer Service Project I have amassed 62 hours of work on the Pueblo Indian exhibit with the Head of Fabrication & Exhibit Production. Up to now our focus has been constructing and refining the one major and four minor dioramas that will display the collection of roughly 300 miniature villagers and kachina dancers (which we will begin restoring next) crafted in the likeness of the Pueblo Indians who inhabited the Four Corners region of the United States from roughly 300 BCE to 1300 CE. The technical knowledge I have gained from fixing details on the major diorama and my ongoing building of the other four minor dioramas from scratch rival what is gained from years of traditional schooling on the subject. Seemingly endless research on Pueblo housing, terrain, and vegetation while planning my dioramas to ensure depictive accuracy has yes, given me the ability to tell you exactly why the rocks found in the Southwest are shaped the way they are, which is amazing don’t get me wrong, but my research has taught me something more spiritual, and that is what keeps me going as I scan the shelves of the museum library to add yet another book to my to-read pile. Because as I flip through the hundreds of pages of Pueblo housing reconstruction images, my mind cannot help but return to the actual remains of the ones I saw in the Southwest. No matter what, naturally or unnaturally, the work of our ancestors will be lost to time, and because of this unavoidable fate I realize that as someone in a position like mine, I must take the chance to document and immortalize the architecture of these groups in the form of my exhibit, because a depiction of Pueblo life cannot be complete without it. My experience in the Southwest has fostered my fascination with the relationship between man and earth and subsequently the role it will play in my final exhibit. Native American communities are not just their people, but the land they inhabit and the things they create with what it gives them.
