For more than 50 years, I’ve collected Native American artifacts from powwows, craft fairs and the annual holiday market at the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
My enthusiasm stems from the fact that my great-grandmother was the first white woman to settle in Steele County, Minn., and in my teen years, I spent summers at Red Pine Camp for Girls in Minnocqua, Wisc.
One of my favorite childhood trips was attending the outdoor performance of the “Song of Hiawatha” based on Longfellow’s poem and held in Pipestone, Minn. It closed after 60 years, but half a million people saw the pageant, which began in 1948. Thus, it is no wonder that I was fascinated by the lore, history, stories, crafts, art, sculpture, music, dances, fashion and culture of the Ojibwa, Chippewa, Salteaux and others of the Anishinaabe people in the northern Midwest.
And you can imagine how thrilled I was after moving to South Bethany in 1973, that the nearby Nanticokes — one of the two tribes in Delaware (the other being the Lenni-Lenape) — had their own annual powpows and eventually a museum in nearby Millsboro.
But now that I face the challenge of downsizing, I am coping with what actor Harrison Ford listed as one of his goals for 2020 when he recently admitted to Parade magazine that “I want to finally get rid of half the things I’ve accumulated in my life and organize everything. I’m trying to get rid of stuff. It might be useful to somebody else.”
And I’ve discovered that the real secret to parting with things one dearly loves is to find a home where others will take great joy from my collection as well.
The Nanticoke tribe has 550 members in Delaware but 1,500 in the U.S. The Delaware…
