Museum celebrates Native American culture
The USU Museum of Anthropology held its first ever Student Night at the Museum on Wednesday.
Students were invited to listen to presentations, eat free food provided by the museum and learn about different cultures.
According to Museum Curator Elizabeth Sutton, this year the museum has been more community oriented than in the past. She said the night was started to include USU students and get them to start visiting the museum.
“Everybody’s welcome, but we tend to advertise more with just the community,” Sutton said. “We want to do more for students and encourage them, just to have a night where they can get some free food, take a break, come and learn something.”
The theme of Student Night was Navajo Culture. The Native American Student Council joined with the museum to give presentations to help those in attendance learn about the culture.
“We put out a general call to all of the diversity clubs if they would be wanting to do this,” Sutton said. “The Native American group was the one that kind of jumped on it right away and said, ‘Yes, we have this. We’d like to do this.'”
The event started with a presentation by Miss American Indian USU Lindsay June. She spoke on the responsibilities involved with her position and gave a presentation on Native American culture which included a performance of “Amazing Grace” in the Navajo language. June was followed by Gabrielle George, a member of the Native American Student Council, who performed a traditional Navajo dance known as “Jingle Dress.”
After the presentations, students took a tour of the Navajo exhibit, which featured different Navajo quilts. Part of the tour included a demonstration where the students learned how to weave with the Navajo looms.
“The whole exhibit is basically on the whole process of Navajo weaving,” Sutton said. “They raise their own sheep. They do the whole process. Navajo rugs are really, really big in the art market and are worth tons of money. The ones we have on loan here are worth thousands of dollars. It’s a fun exhibit to highlight. Our modern society values it because of the price we’ve assigned to it, but there’s a deeper story there.”
Sutton said she hopes to do more Student Nights next semester.
“This is the first ever student night,” Sutton said. “Starting this academic year I’ve been trying to partner with a lot of the diversity groups on campus because the whole purpose of anthropology is to promote culture and diversity. We’re hoping next semester to have couple more, maybe once a month, partnering with some more students here.”
Kevin Price, a freshman majoring in anthropology and a volunteer at the museum, said he was happy with how the first student night went and is looking forward to more in the future.
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“I think it went fantastic,” Price said. “We had a lot of people who came. We weren’t expecting this kind of turnout. This is on par with our Saturdays. Our Saturdays are really pretty good.”
The museum is hoping to include other clubs for Student Night at the Museum in the future.
“We want to reach out to the other clubs around campus to get more publicity for the clubs as well as for the museum to help get more cultural awareness,” said Alicia Olea, a volunteer at the museum and a member of the Native American Student Council. “It’s a great opportunity for students to learn of other cultures and to keep an open mind.”
– rmhenline@gmail.com