FIRST AMERICANS MUSEUM
AT SUNRISE ON A COLD NOVEMBER MORNING, ON A PLOT OF BATTERED LAND ALONG THE SOUTHERN BANK OF the Oklahoma River, where one of the largest-producing oil fields in the state of Oklahoma once stood, and after that, a site for motocross races, leaders and citizens of the 39 tribes in Oklahoma today, along with the governor and other state officials plus board members of a yet to be realized museum, finally saw hope. Despite the fact that the earth had sunk so low by then it had been declared a 100-year flood plain, more than a thousand people showed up to usher in a new future for the land and the people who once lived on it — to reclaim it as their own.
“It was an abused piece of property,” says Shoshana Wasserman, deputy director of the First Americans Museum. “We needed to bless this land for how it was going to serve in the future. We had to prepare it in a culturally significant way. We lit a new fire that day, and we invited the tribal leaders to bring ashes from the fires of their original homeland and we contributed all of that to the new fire that day. We still have those combined ashes.”
This September, 16 years after that first blessing of the land, the $175 million First Americans Museum is finally opening its doors to the public with two inaugural exhibitions that celebrate the rich and diverse history of the 39 different tribes in Oklahoma today. , two Choctaw words that later became — a collection of objects on a 10-year loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian — showcases 144 everyday cultural objects, “material culture” collected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from tribes in Oklahoma.
