Tomorrow and Sunday (May 19 and 20), from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm, the opening celebration of the new imagiNATIONS Activity Center at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian — New York (One Bowling Green, near the intersection of Broadway and Battery Place) will offer a weekend of activities showcasing the ingenuity of the indigenous cultures of the Americas.
Children will practice balancing techniques needed to master control of a traditional Yup’ik kayak from the Arctic, learn how to weave rope strong enough to create a bridge like those found in the Andes of Peru, discover the counting and numeric skills of the Mayans, and take part in a vast array of activities that embrace Native innovations throughout history.
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The new facility is already a hit with local kids, having hosted a contingent of fifth graders from P.S. 276, in Battery Park City earlier this week. The students knew quickly they were not in a traditional museum (where the governing principle always seems to be, “look, but don’t touch”), when Smithsonian staff encouraged (in some cases, dared) them on to grab and handle artifacts and climb aboard the frame of an ocean-going kayak.
The debut of the imagiNATIONS Activity Center is the culmination of a multimillion-dollar project that has transformed 4,500 square feet of former office space within the historic U.S Customs House into a state-of-the-art educational and exhibition spaces.
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Among the learning experiences will be “cropetition” (a farming computer simulation that invites kids to pit their skills against weather, pests and disease to keep their families alive the way Haudenosaunee people of New York did. This becomes as community-building exercise as groups of up to four players realize they all do better when they cooperate.
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There will also be puzzles, experiments, and games related to math as practiced by the ancient Maya civilization, the architectural skills developed by iglu builders in the Arctic, an engineering insights cultivated by Mezo-American peoples who had to devise way to span deep gorges.
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The imagiNATIONS Activity Center’s goal is to demonstrate the influence and impact of Native innovations and technologies on everyday life in ways that will engage visitors and stimulate their thinking, and thus convey that often-overlooked truth that Native innovations continue to shape the world of today.
Admission is free. For more information, call 212-514-3700, or click here.