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Our virtual resources provide teachers and students with the opportunity to enrich their perspectives on many of the traditions, material culture, and belief systems of various North American Indian tribes.

Video Resources

Compare & Contrast Tour 

In this series of five videos, we’ll discuss the resources Native Americans used to survive in their environments.

This exhibit's centerpiece, titled Indian Country, features a contemporary powwow grand entry scene with 37 life-sized figures dressed in colorful dance attire.

These figures are on an enormous turntable around singers at a drum and pass through areas of theatrical lighting accompanied by the sounds of American Indian music.

Ames, Michael
1991 Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: The Anthropology of Museums. Vancouver, B.C.: UBC Press.

Bancroft-Hunt, Norman, and Forman, Werner
1979 People of the Totem: The Indians of the Pacific Northwest. London: Orbis Publishing.

Barnett, H.G.
1938 The Nature of the Potlatch in American Anthropologist 40(3): 349-358.

Enjoy the delicious Indigenous cuisine of Ketapanen Kitchen, Chicago's first Native American pop-up kitchen and catering company.

North America was colonized by several European powers and these various nations brought a wide assortment of goods to the continent to be traded with native groups.

Many ordinary objects from Europe had a powerful market value for American Indian tribes. These items and their associated purpose were often adopted and adapted by native peoples. Such is the case with silk ribbons, which were used by Woodland Indians to create a form of appliqué decoration not seen before in Europe.

Beginnings in the Great Lakes

Though scholars find language the most efficient way to classify American Indian groups, many tribes would fall under broad language groups. The Kickapoo, meaning “those who walk the earth” or “he who moves here and there,” are grouped with other tribes in the Algonquian linguistic lineage, and were situated in what A. M. Gibson refers to as the “Algonquian heartland” (1963:3).

Dawn Scher Thomae

Curator of Collections/Senior Collection Manager

Thomae@mpm.edu or 414-278-6157

The Milwaukee Public Museum's Anthropology department collections comprise over 400,000 objects.

Ethnographic material includes artifacts from indigenous North and South American groups, African and Pacific aboriginal peoples, and some Southeast Asian tribal groups. The archaeological collection includes artifacts from the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East.

The vast majority of American Indian baby carriers were made of hide and cloth, or woven from woody stems and shoots.

These are referred to simply as “cradles” and “cradle baskets.” While the term “cradle” better encompasses the variety present in Native carrier construction, it is also frequently used to describe carriers used by non-Native cultures.

Stockbridge-Munsee Culture

Originally, the Native people who made up the Stockbridge-Munsee Tribe came from Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania. During the 1770s, Stockbridge -- a mixed Native and White Christian community -- was formed in western Massachusetts, largely drawing on members of the Mahikan or Mohican tribe which occupied eastern New York, western Massachusetts, and parts of western Connecticut.