Exhibition Reviews

Benjamin Filene and Brian Horrigan
Contributing Editors

Introduction

The contributing editors encourage readers to suggest representations of history in American public culture that might be reviewed. In addition to continuing coverage of museum exhibitions, they are interested in covering living history projects, historical pageants and reenactments, memorials, historic preservation projects, and virtual museums. Please contact:

Benjamin Filene Brian Horrigan Department of History Minnesota Historical Society University of North Carolina 345 W. Kellogg Blvd. P.O. Box 26170 St. Paul, MN 55102 Greensboro, NC 27402 brian.horrigan@mnhs.org bpfilene@uncg.edu      We would like to thank the American Association for State and Local History for providing information on the work of its members.
"Tribal Paths: Colorado American Indians, 1500 to the Present." Colorado History Museum, Denver, Colo. http://www.coloradohistory.org/exhibits/Tribal_Paths/TP_exhibit.html.       Permanent exhibition, opened Jan. 2006. 5,000 sq. ft. Bridget Ambler, curator.
"Tribal Paths," an exhibition that opened at the Colorado History Museum in 2006, succeeds in representing American Indians' history and cultures without getting stuck in the past. The exhibition chronicles well-known episodes and themes in Indian history over the last five hundred years, including trade and the devastating effects of disease during early contacts with Euro-Americans; military encounters and treaties in the nineteenth century; and reservation life, Indian schools, mascot debates, and urban experiences in the twentieth century. "Tribal Paths" shares one of the main goals of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian—to show that American Indians are "still here," as the introductory text panel states. Through displays of present-day commemorations of historic events and ceremonies, the exhibition leaves visitors with the strong impression that Indians of Colorado maintain a sense of cultural identity by melding old traditions with contemporary ways of life.	1
The mixture of American Indian and Euro-American objects in the Colorado History Museum's re-creation of a late nineteenth-century parlor belonging to Amache Powers, a daughter of the Cheyenne Chief Lone Bear, challenges popular dichotomies between American Indian and Euro-American cultures. Photo by James Peterson. Courtesy Colorado Historical Society.
The well-designed and inviting exhibition space leads visitors through curvilinear rooms containing a rich array of artifacts, photographs, and videos that chronicle significant events in Indian history. The exhibition offers the general public a very good introductory overview of Colorado Indian cultures, but some features undermine its stated goals. Its reliance on lengthy text labels, the replication of the traditional Euro-American narrative of American Indian history, and the use of nineteenth-century artifacts that people are accustomed to seeing in museums might hinder visitors' ability to see beyond persistent American Indian stereotypes.	. . .