Interact
If You Missed the Smithsonian Folklife Festival ...
George Catlin, Jú-ah-kís-gaw, Woman With Her Child in a Cradle, 1835, oil, 29 x 24 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr., 1985.66.186
See our video showing a contemporary Paiute creating a cradleboard! (Quicktime Movie, 5.8 MB)
At the 2005 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, employees of the U.S. Forest Service demonstrated traditions of their communities. Angie Bullets, a member of the Kaibab Band of Paiute, lives and works in the Kaibab National Forest, part of her tribe's reservation in northern Arizona.
In the tradition of her people, Angie Bullets creates cradleboards, which mothers have used to carry babies for generations. Watch her make a cradleboard hood with fibers from her ancestral lands in our video interview! You need the Quicktime plug-in to view this file.
To see a Paiute cradleboard in use, visit the National Anthropological Archives online catalog. Cradleboards are made by many Native American tribes, though their materials and design vary. SAAM's painting Jú-ah-kís-gaw, Woman with Her Child in a Cradle, depicts an Ojibwe mother and baby. The artist, George Catlin, traveled to the Great Plains in the 1830s to document American Indians. To learn more about Catlin and his remarkable Indian Gallery, visit our Catlin classroom.
If you are really excited about Native American culture, check out the National Museum of the American Indian at www.nmai.si.edu. Their National Powwow takes place August 12 through 14!
If you have comments or suggestions about this page please email us. The address is saaminteract@si.edu.
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