Smithsonian Bilingual Website Focuses on Caribbean Indigenous People

UCTP Taino News - The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian has launched a revised bilingual website of the exhibition The New Old World:Antilles/El Nuevo Viejo Mundo: Las Antillas with new images, video and additional materials. The revised website is located at the same url as the previous version. "The New Old World" exhibition is a documentation of the contemporary lives of Taino and Carib indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian is an institution of living cultures dedicated to the life, languages, literature, history and arts of the Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere. The museum includes the recently opened National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall; the George Gustav Heye Center, a permanent museum in lower Manhattan; and the Cultural Resources Center, a research and collections facility in Suitland, Md.

Photo: NMAI in Washington D.C.

UCTPTN 06.04.2008

Caribbean Indigenous Photo Exhibition to Close

UCTP Taino News – The National Museum of the American Indian, George Gustuv Heye is closing its Caribbean Indigenous focused photo exhibition, “The New Old World” after several extensions on March 17, 2008.

The exhibition featuring photographs by Marisol Villanueva have been on display at the Heye since June 2007. According to Villanueva the concept of The New Old World project emerged from her being a witness of the demonstrations and protests of the indigenous people on the so celebrated five hundred anniversary of the invasion of the land that is today known as the Americas or the New World.

In an interview with UCTP Taíno News, Villanueva also notes that “the initial phase of the project Antilles: Living Beyond the Myth, currently exhibiting at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in New York, takes place in the Caribbean Antilles, where most people think all indigenous people vanished after the Europeans got there.”

She continued stating “this exhibition challenges that myth of extinction, represented not only by the survival of the indigenous people of the Caribbean, but also by the revitalization movements and legacy that still lives in our culture.”

NMAI is also working on updates to the exhibition’s online version, adding video interviews and excerpts of a forum that accompanied it when it traveled to Puerto Rico in 2005.

Villanueva hopes the project will provide the public with the “opportunity of learning a little more about the true story of the indigenous people of the Caribbean Antilles, their way of living and to be conscious of how much of our culture still lives on.”

Photo: Melanie Calderón, Trinidad (Credit: Marisol Villanueva)

UCTPTN 03.15.2008