Native Waters: Sharing the Source

The Native Waters: Sharing the Source Traveling Exhibit is an approximately 500-square-foot traveling exhibit created by Native Waters, Project WET (Water Education for Teachers) to help both children and adults explore the importance of water in their lives. The exhibit was designed by the Native Waters project in cooperation with the Science Museum of Minnesota while at Montana State University, for use in schools, museum, libraries and cultural centers.

Using a variety of art forms, such as hands-on activities, interviews with tribal people and a film, Native Waters: Sharing the Source shares cultural and scientific ways of learning about water.

The exhibit floor plan is based on the Plains Indian tipi liner and outside cover. The inside space of the exhibit or tipi is a space to learn and hear stories. Audio and video areas have replaced the oral historian and story teller to introduce different aspects of the world of Native Waters, while hands-on interactives introduce basic principles of water science to a variety of age groups.

At the center of the exhibit is a sculpture of a spring. The spring rests on a field of green and designed into the green floor covering are four red pathways to the four cardinal directions. Representing the tipi liner are banners of red, blue, yellow, and white, which carry primal designs and drawings. Each banner expresses a theme and contains quotes from Missouri Basin elders and/or tribal members.

Animals on each banner have mythic, spiritual, religious or commercial significance to the tribal people of the Missouri River Basin.

Discover within the numerous messages on each banner that the sunrise and sunset are marked on the east and west banners, and the phases of the moon are noted across the cardinal locations. Discuss the effects of the sun and the moon on water to your class while reading the statements from elders.

On the outside of the exhibit or tipi wall is a mural or story of the Missouri River Basin from the river’s headwaters to its confluence with the Mississippi River. The river’s story starts high in the Rocky Mountains and travels east toward the sunrise until it reaches the mouth of the Mississippi River near the mounds of Cahokia, the Native settlement that once was home to over 50,000 people.

The story of the river as told by the paintings shows the river moving eastward and downhill it encounters seasonal changes that affect its size that some say is its pulse. Within the story of the river are seasonal changes that are laid out in a counter-clockwise movement, while the river moves clockwise. The clockwise, counter-clockwise movement represents the directions of natural whirlpools in the two hemispheres as well as the rotations of the planets in our solar system. It also holds the idea that while we travel forward we should remember the past.

Native Waters: Sharing the Source is an exhibit that is completed by the people interacting within its boundaries. To view the exhibit full of people is to see the Missouri River Basin and its many inhabitants of people.

It is our hope that our visitors come to the exhibit with their eyes to the future and realize the many aspects of life along the Missouri River Basin. Visitors should travel to their homes with a renewed respect and appreciation for water. It is with the understanding of today we encouraged all people to protect our sacred water and remember we are just “Sharing the Source.”