On Display Now:  Cultural Crossroads - Highlights from the Museum Collection

For millennia, the vast stretch of land between the Platte and Arkansas Rivers and east of the Rocky Mountains has been a Cultural Crossroads. Award winning Historian Elliot West has written, "White Pioneers who moved onto the plains east to west believed they were leaving the old country for the new. They had it exactly backward. Before the first human habitation on the eastern seaboard... plainsmen had fashioned flourishing economies... Different peoples lived with shifting resources - sometimes abundant, often scarce...reaching much farther to trade for more. The region's deep history was a continuing, dazzling improvisation... " 

Many native people have called this area home, among them: Ute, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache. Although the Ute claimed the mountains to the west, for generations they joined their Plains Indian neighbors in hunting bison and game on the wild grasses of the plains. From the south came the Spanish who founded settlements in present day New Mexico in the sixteenth century. From the coasts came Russian, British, French and American fur traders, eager to profit from ancient trade routes and a preexisting system of intertribal trade.  

With extensive contact and occasional conflict over shared resources, American Indians absorbed and transmitted the cultural influences of their neighbors. As a result, Plains, Plateau, Great Basin, and Southwestern tribes transferred traditions and technologies as they traded goods. The striking examples of American Indian beadwork, clothing, baskets, and other materials in this exhibit provide evidence of the ongoing creative innovation and adaptation of native peoples in a region noted for being - a Cultural Crossroads. 

This extraordinary exhibit focuses on the rich breadth of American Indian history and culture in the Pikes Peak region by examining both beautiful and utilitarian objections from our collections.