By Betsa Marsh

The scuffed pipe tomahawk feels a bit forlorn, yet the new red hair ribbons look perky. The worn moccasins seem bereft, but the freshly stitched leggings look joyous. Can the 1795 peace medals be ironic while the modern turtle brooch is ebullient?

A Bicentennial preview event, “myaamiaki iiši meehtohseeniwiciki (How the Miami People Live),” opens Sept. 18 and runs through Dec. 15, 2008, at the Miami University Art Museum. The then-and-now breadth of the exhibition will sweep through all three galleries, spotlighting treasures from the late 1700s into the 21st century. Modern aspects of the Myaamia Tribe, who once inhabited the land where Miami University now stands, will speak of a culture holding tenaciously to its language and traditions.

The message, from the opening Myaamia map through the final ribbon-weaving demonstration, is that the Myaamia were and are still here. Their sovereign nation might now be headquartered in Miami, Okla., but the university reinforces ties to its namesake tribe each year through scholarships, service trips, and social exchanges — all part of Miami’s Myaamia Project.

“How the Miami People Live” — with an emphasis on the present tense — is a collaboration of the Miami Tribe’s Office of Cultural Resources and the Miami University Art Museum. More than 120 pieces will be drawn from museums around the country, coupled with pieces from modern tribal members.

For Julie Olds of the Miami Nation, this will be “a landmark exhibition, to say the least.” The former cultural resources officer for the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma is co-curator of the show with Daryl Baldwin, a Miami tribal member who directs the Myaamia Project.

Armed with a 2004 National Park Service grant under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, Olds formed a tribal team that fanned out to 18 museums. They photographed and built a database of Myaamia pieces. Some of the surprises?

“I was overwhelmed by the extent of the collections at the Cranbrook Institute (of Science), with the types of ribbon work and the levels of skills. Some of the objects clearly were from graves, and I was taken aback by that.”

Olds and her team dove into the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), which has about 125 objects attributed to Miami culture. Soon, NMAI’s Jim Pepper-Henry was proposing a community-curated exhibition. And where better to host a Myaamia exhibition than Miami University?

At his 2006 inauguration, where the late Miami Chief Floyd Leonard also spoke, President David Hodge talked of the university’s “great pride” in the close relationship between the Miami people and the Tribe’s namesake.

Hodge highlighted the university’s commitment to the Myaamia language through the Myaamia Project, tribal members’ studying on campus, and the upcoming exhibit. “All of these contribute to our learning by providing insights into a culture that has much to teach us.”

Olds says, “We have a mantra that ‘Knowledge is Responsibility.’ Now that we know about these pieces, we have a responsibility to make it open to tribal citizens.

“It’s one thing to look at a photo of a panel bag that held a ceremonial bundle 200 years ago. But it’s not until you’re one to one with that thing that all your senses kick in and you’re able to pay attention to the real colors, the real materials.”

To share this new knowledge, the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma will charter buses to bring members to the university this fall. Every year, Miamians and Miami tribal members burn up the blacktop along a 650-mile route, with students and professors heading west on academic, social, and community service trips, and Miami tribal members coming east for Myaamia seminars and cultural exchanges.

This fall, five tribal members will enroll as Miami Indian Heritage Award scholarship recipients, joining 56 previous tribal scholars who have spent some or all of their college years on the Oxford campus.

Current Miami Tribe Students Dirk Long ’09 mechanical engineering/ engineering physics Diana Steed ’11 psychology Scott Swaidner ’11 journalism Karise Okuly ’10 social studies education history Kelsey Young ’08 gerontology Taylor Pyle ’11 business Jessie Baldwin ’11 early childhood education Jesse Richardville ’09 sociology

A living people with a past “myaamiaki iiši meehtohseeniwiciki (How the Miami People Live),” a Bicentennial preview event at the Miami University Art Museum, opens Thursday, Sept. 18. President David Hodge will speak at 4 p.m., followed by a dedication in the art museum’s sculpture park of a bronze sculpture by Miami Indian artist Eugene Brown, inspired by art seen here, representing the unity of the Miami Tribe, Oxford, Ohio, and Miami University. On the 18th prior to 4 p.m., the museum will be closed to the public to allow Miami tribal members to view the exhibition, which will run through Monday, Dec. 15, 2008. For more information, visit www.fna.muohio.edu/artmuseum or call the museum at 513-529-2232.

Certainly, Robert Wicks, director of the Miami University Art Museum, is a familiar face in Miami, Okla.

“Dr. Wicks was at our Family Day in 2007 and showed photos of the artifacts,” Olds says. “People didn’t know what to expect, but they said, ‘WOW!’

“There is a comfort level in the relationship between Miami University and the tribal leaders, and we know Dr. Wicks will do it right,” Olds adds. “He will be respectful about how he works with us. He’s left the development of the theme of the exhibition, the grand opening, and the feel of it to the tribe.”

Working in the art museum, Wicks folds back tissue paper on a ceremonial hair piece. “I identify the historical artifacts and go through the loan approval process.”

He’s most excited about a letter he unearthed in the Library of Congress, written by Gen. James Wilkinson, introducing legendary Miami Chief Little Turtle to Gen. George Washington. “It’s the only thing we know for certain he carried. No one in the tribe knew about it.”

The show will be the first time that Miami Indian peace medals will be displayed together: Shining ovals that show Washington and the native chiefs commemorating the 1795 Treaty of Greenville. “They’re engraved,” Wicks says, “because it was before the U.S. Mint could strike them.”

In retrospect, the very concept of a fancy peace medal between whites and Indians appears heavily tainted with foreboding of the decimation to come.

The Myaamia, “the downstream people,” once numbered tens of thousands in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, lower Michigan, and lower Wisconsin. Through battle, treaty, and forced removal, the tribal headquarters is now more than 600 miles from these Ohio ancestral lands.

“The treaty period was devastating, marked by the massive cession of lands required at the Greenville Treaty of 1795,” Miami Nation Enterprises, a political economic subdivision of the tribe, writes on its Web site. “It was the vicious tenacity of the early leaders of this country that would lead to President Andrew Jackson signing the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that would set in motion a chain of events that would alter our place, and people, forever.”

The Treaty of 1840 required the tribe’s removal to regions beyond the Mississippi. “ … In October of 1846, our ancestors, numbering approximately 500 souls, were headed at gunpoint and forced onto canal boats to begin the long journey down the Erie Canal system. …”

They rebuilt their community near La Cygne, Kan., until the Treaty of 1867 “called for their removal again, this time to the Indian Territory, known today as Oklahoma,” the narration continues. “Upon arrival … our Nation numbered 68 adults.”

While the tribe has decided not to focus on the removal in the exhibit, it pulses beneath the surface. “In some ways, we are still living the outcomes of that very recent memory,” says Myaamia Project director Daryl Baldwin, who can trace his Myaamia ancestors into the 18th century.

“The 1795 treaty released the property that Miami stands on to the government. Miami University was chartered in 1809 — not long afterward,” Baldwin says. “Then in 1846, the Miamis were removed at gunpoint by the U.S. Army to an unwanted reservation in Kansas, and they came down the path of the Miami-Erie Canal. They passed down by the university, when classes were taking place. That’s another historical connection.”

The university established modern contact with the Miami Tribe, which now has about 3,530 members and 2,000 acres, in the 1970s. The informal relationship grew into a tribal initiative at the university in 2001 to develop language and cultural materials for the Miami Tribe: the Myaamia Project.

Within the project, members of Miami’s geography department and the Miami Nation are working on “The Historical Landscapes of the Miami.” They’re mapping native names of rivers and towns, as well as historic vegetation, in the Miami region from about 1650 to 1850.

Their work will be part of the exhibit’s opening gallery, which establishes a tribal sense of place. “The river names will probably be done by then,” Baldwin says.

“The timing of the exhibition, just before the Bicentennial of Miami University, is educational. It will speak of the people who were here and are here, whose descendants are here.

“The huge hurdle is that the public school system still teaches Indians as archaic people — children are disappointed if I don’t show up with beads and feathers,” Baldwin says. “When we’re taught as a people from the past, rather than a living people with a past, we aren’t allowed to change. We become icons of history.”

It’s just that petrifaction that Wicks hopes to shatter with “How the Miami People Live.”

“I want to blow the stereotypes out of the water, to show that these are not static traditions, but cultural elements that change in response to survival. I want our students to say, ‘That’s not what I expected,’ because these works are very different from what they’ve seen with other Native American tribes.”

The Miamis’ ribbon and beadwork, for instance, look nothing like that of the Plains tribes. Their pottery, basketry, clothing, and ornaments are all distinctive. Miami coin silver jewelry did not come through the silversmithing tradition of Mexico, but rather from French Canadian and Philadelphia Quaker artisanship.

The exhibition will run right up to contemporary artifacts, such as the coin silver crown, brooch, and sash worn by the late Evelyn Bellmyer as 2004 Miami Nation senior princess, and into heirlooms-in-the-making. In the museum’s third and largest gallery, Olds will bring Miami artists to demonstrate traditional skills.

“We have two main intents,” Wicks says of this historic assemblage of Miami treasures. “We want to be a cultural guidebook for the Miami today. And we want to echo the tenet of the National Museum of the American Indian: ‘We are still here.’ ”

Betsa Marsh wrote about DNA testing in the Spring 2008 Miamian.

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