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The Role of Oral Tradition

Oral tradition is important in all societies, despite the reliance of some cultures on written records and accounts. These traditions account for the ways things are and often the way they should be, and assist people in educating the young and teaching important lessons about the past and about life. Because many oral traditions are highly structured and are told faithfully without alteration, they can be as reliable as other non-oral ways of recording and passing on experiences.

Jacqueline M. Schweitzer - Chester Read Curator of History Collections

Jackie is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with a BA in Anthropology and Classical Civilization, and a MA in American History with a Certificate in Museum Studies. Her interests include American and local history with a special interest in Milwaukee WPA projects, especially the Milwaukee Handicraft Project. She has previously worked as a Conservation Assistant at the Milwaukee Art Museum and Exhibition Project Coordinator at the Milwaukee Public Museum.

The geographical regions of North America are diverse, and so too are the people who adapted to those environments. Tribes that shared a regional domain with access to many of the same resources and environmental constraints would often develop similar technology and artistic decoration. Regional boundaries only show general patterns of similarity; they are not static.

With the exception of dogs, Native people in the Great Lakes region had no domesticated animals, so they depended on their own power for transportation.

Walking was the most common way of moving, and personal possessions were limited largely to what the people could carry themselves.

For the indigenous First Nations of Canada’s Pacific coast, masks are more than mere decoration or ceremonial props; they are part of a living tradition that connects people to their community, their collective past, their creator, their ancestors, their cosmology, and powerful elemental forces.

The majority of the masks presented here were made by Kwakiutl[1]  (now known as Kwakwak

Plains ledger art was adopted as a means of historical representation for the Indian peoples of the Great Plains during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Although the Plains Indians had no written language in which to record their history, they did have a long tradition of preserving oral histories pictorially. For centuries, Plains Indian men kept historical records of their tribes, first with petroglyphs and pictographs on rock walls, and then painted on buffalo hides.

When was Aztalan first discovered?

Aztalan was first discovered by Europeans in the fall of 1835 by early Wisconsin Territory settler Timothy Johnson of Watertown. Upon hearing stories of the site, Judge Nathaniel Hyer, a Milwaukee settler, visited. His description, the first at-length published account of Aztalan, appeared in the Milwaukee Advertiser, Volume One, Number 29 on Saturday, February 25th, 1837. In this account, Judge Hyer also produced the first rudimentary map of the site.