The corner of Central Street and Central Park Avenue looks like any other corner in Evanston from the outside. There are speeding cars, tall apartment buildings and a bustling Mobil station. But behind the bright red doors of the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian is another world, where men hunt buffalo and women send tribes to war.
Founded in 1977, the museum was not the product of scholarly research or government preservation efforts. It does not contain millions of dollars worth of relics. Rather, the Mitchell Museum is a manifestation of one man’s childhood passion for American Indian culture and his desire to educate his own community.
The late John Mitchell, a Northwestern graduate who grew up in Evanston, gathered American Indian relics since he was young. Even then, he already perceived the race as a forgotten people.
“When my husband was a little boy, his uncle was an agent to the Osage (Indian) reservation,” said Betty Mitchell, his 91-year-old widow who now lives in Tucson, Ariz. “But then he would go to school, and nothing was said about Indians. He decided that when he grew up, he would tell the people of his town who the Indians were.”
Mitchell said her husband always had dreams of opening a museum. When the two got married, she decided they would open one together. His collection was already substantial but John Mitchell said they needed more to open an entire museum.
So they dropped everything. They rented a car, and took a road trip.
“We spent two months on the road visiting Indian villages and trading posts,” Mitchell said. “We kept the things in our home for a while and later moved them into a new building.”
The collection eventually became part of a department at Kendall College, originally a liberal arts school located in Evanston until last year. Kendall College became known for its culinary arts and needed to use the extra space the collection occupied, Mitchell said. When Kendall moved its campus to Goose Island in Chicago, Mitchell found a different building in Evanston that had been abandoned for almost a decade. That spot would become the Mitchell Museum’s permanent home.
Today, Mitchell hopes that the museum will be able to completely separate from Kendall College so it can stay in the city where her husband was raised. After about a year of negotiations, her goal is in sight.
“My dream is that we will be able to stand on our own, which is quite a big step,” Mitchell said. “It’s important to me that this continues because it’s teaching people about the culture. Busloads of children come every single morning to get educated about the culture.”
“Busloads” is not an exaggeration, said museum director Janice B. Klein. About 6,000 schoolchildren visit each year with their classes to do craft projects, such as making traditional dreamcatchers, and learn about American Indian societies.
“John wanted this in his community so kids and families could have access to the really good stuff,” Klein said. “He wasn’t interested in fakes or imitations.”
The museum holds both historical material and American Indian arts and crafts made as recently as this year. The exhibit on the second floor twice changes twice annually, but Klein said almost everything is from the museum’s own collection. Currently, the special exhibit is “Sisters to Sacajawea,” which focuses on the female role in American Indian culture.
Sacajawea, whose face appears on the coin dollar, led Lewis and Clark on their journeys through the West.
Although Sacajawea’s leadership is the exhibit’s focus, it tries to honor many women who were instrumental in providing for their families and tribes.
“Virginia Woolf said for most of history, ‘anonymous’ was a woman,” Klein said. “If anonymous is a woman, then women of color are doubly anonymous.”
But Klein said Native American women owned the sheep and fields and were primarily responsible for food, clothing and shelter. In the Iroquois tribes, the female heads of each clan decided when the tribe would go to war and who would lead. Klein said this had a great effect on women’s suffrage near the turn of the century. On the plains, the key religious figure was a figure.
“Women did a lot of the work, but they had a great deal of authority,” Klein said. “It was the kind of thing where the husband would come back and say, ‘I got you a buffalo – what do we do with it now?'”
Despite its historical and educational value, Klein said the museum’s location makes it one of the area’s best-kept secrets.
“It’s the sort of thing that people keep saying, ‘This is in Chicago?'” Klein said.
But the Native American population of Chicago, which Klein estimates at 20,000, knows exactly why the Mitchell Museum is here. Christine Redcloud, community coordinator for the American Indian Center of Chicago, said the facility has had a great impact, keeping the same sentiment that caused John Mitchell to turn his collection into an museum.
“The general public needs to learn about Indian people,” Redcloud said. “They have a valuable collection of items and their participation with the community is important.”
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