The exhibit's centerpiece, titled Indian Country, features a modern powwow grand entry scene with 37 life-sized figures dressed in colorful dance attire. These figures move on an enormous turntable around singers at a drum, and pass through areas of theatrical lighting, accompanied by the sounds of American Indian music. Various aspects of contemporary American Indian life, reservation and urban, will be shown in conjunction with the powwow.
The Indian Country powwow figures are based on life casts of Indian people representing Wisconsin's seven tribes. The local American Indian community has dedicated hundreds of hours to the fabrication of the powwow outfits and drum used in the exhibit.

Indian Country is flanked by numerous dynamic exhibits describing a contemporary American Indian powwow and celebrating the survival of American Indian cultures.

Other segments present the history of American Indian and non-Indian relations. Subjects such as The First Americans, Outnumbered and Outarmed, and Federal Policies and Indian Strategies are explored in detail.

Since 1990, MPM, the American Indian Advisory Council and the local American Indian community have been working together on the exhibit's content and production.

The cost of this landmark project was $1,500,000. The museum has received a grant award from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the amount of $400,000, a $250,000 gift from the Forest County Potawatomi tribe, Omni Bingo of Wisconsin, and the Indian Community School, and a $75,000 donation from the Rockefeller Foundation. The remaining funds were raised with private sector sponsorship.

The common stereotype of the American Indian is of a mounted warrior wearing a feathered warbonnet and living in a village of buffalo skin tipis. Such were the Indians of the Great Plains who made white settlement of the West so perilous - or so many films and books would have us believe. In reality, these "typical" Indians were representative of only one of several cultural patterns developed on the Plains, and their adaptation, while perhaps the most flamboyant and certainly the most romanticized, was also the most recent and the most short-lived.

The Great Plains, including both the fertile prairie and the more arid grasslands of the high plains, encompass a vast area stretching from the edge of the Mississippi Valley to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and extending from Texas well into southern Canada. Much of this region was once thought to be uninhabited prior to introduction of the horse from Europe, but recent excavation has shown that occupation, though never intense, dates back several thousand years. Camps and kill sites point to nomadic peoples living by hunting and gathering, with the American bison or buffalo as an important resource. When the herds were massed, men on foot drove large numbers of bison to their death over bluffs or into manmade corrals where they could be slaughtered.

During other seasons, smaller game and wild plants provided food. This precarious existence prevented the development of large social groups living in permanent settlements.

During the first millennium A.D. agriculture became an important factor in subsistence in the rich prairie grasslands, ultimately extending in the plains along the major river valleys. The cultivation of corn (maize), beans, and squash both required and permitted the establishment of settled villages. In late prehistoric times houses were rectangular but eventually they evolved into the round earth lodges associated with historic plains farmers such as the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Pawnee. Despite their heavy reliance on farming, these groups continued to venture onto the high plains for seasonal buffalo hunts.

By about A.D. 1500, Apacheans who had begun a slow migration from Canada centuries before, were settling into the southern plains and adapting to life on the fringes of the Southwestern pueblos. Some of these groups first obtained horses from Spanish settlements in the 17th century. Through both trade and raiding, the use of horses was well established on the plains by the 1770s.

As a result of pressure from eastern tribes, driven into the prairies by the expansion of white settlement, and the new mobility made possible by the horse, many groups adopted a nomadic life in the high plains where the single major resource was the bison. For groups such as the Sioux, Cheyenne, Crow, Blackfoot and others, the bison provided the shelter of skin tipis, clothing, food, an array of implements of bone and horn, and even fuel in the form of dung, the so-called "buffalo chips." Horses provided transportation and allowed more efficient hunting. This way of life, which became dependent on the buffalo for virtually all material necessities, ended abruptly with the near extinction of the animal by white hunters just over a century ago.

Explore the fens, forests, oak barrens and meadows of Wisconsin, then visit the Birds of Wisconsin display with more than 75 mounted specimens of rare and common birds. Mounted Wisconsin mammals are also on display. In addition, examples of porcupine quillwork, beadwork, weaving and other crafts created by Wisconsin Woodland Indians are shown.