Citizen Potawatomi National Cultural Resources Museum

Purpose: Sustaining Cultural Heritage The Citizen Potawatomi Nation is the ninth-largest federally recognized Indian tribe in the United States, with a tribal membership of 24, 829. Tribal members live in every state and in five foreign countries. The Potawatomi were Algonquin-speaking people who occupied the Great Lakes region from prehistoric times through the early 1800s. By the 1870s, most of the Citizen Potawatomi had resettled in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), forming several communities near present-day Shawnee. The Cultural Resources Museum was built in 1976. This project will preserve historic events through the family histories and recollections of tribal elders. The tribe will use state-of-the-art technology-including digital video, still photography, audio recordings, and archival documentation-to tell the stories of the 41 original Citizen Potawatomi Nation families. Interviews with tribal members will help preserve and share the culture of the nation and will be made available on an interactive Web site. The grant will enable the museum to research, plan, and conduct eight family history sessions; edit the sessions and combine them with research documents to create 15- to 20-minute family documentaries; and establish an interactive Web site that is searchable by family name and accessible to tribal members anywhere in the world.