Venture Inside a Tipi at the Brooklyn Museum

No one seemed to mind whatever was burning during the tipi blessing ceremony last night at the Brooklyn Museum.

A Plains Indian sporting a tall headdress wafted smoke over the crowd with a feather. The fuel may not have been hashish, but it definitely wasn’t balled-up newspaper, either. Onlookers inhaled, raised eyebrows and grinned at each other.

After that, taking in the exhibits in the snapshot-sized “Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains” was a particularly pleasant experience. While 41 tribes from the region that extends from Texas up into Canada are represented in the show (which opens today and continues through May 15), the exhibition is selective. Artifacts such as a beaded horse mask and an Escher-like decorative spoon conjure life on the Plains, detail by detail.

The centerpiece, of course, is a 28-foot-high Blackfeet tipi strikingly painted with a bleeding buffalo skull design. Tipi patterns should be read from the ground up, from earth to sky; the red triangles at the base represent mountains, while the yellow circles at the top suggest stars. As a fascinating bit of background, a video showing how the tipi was constructed can be viewed here.

Visitors can enter the tipi and experience the impressive space from the inside. A plaque at the entrance informs guests of tipi protocol: people should move in a clockwise direction inside, walk behind rather than in front of anyone sitting down, avoid touching the sides and utter no angry or rude words.

Also, “Children are taken outside if they fuss, yell, or misbehave.” (Perhaps we could erect a tipi over all of Park Slope?)

While the historical artifacts are well preserved and the background information about the significance of horses and buffalo to the tribes is interesting, the most revealing part of the exhibition is a series of photographic slideshows that run on three television screens.

The first, a set of archival images taken by non-Native photographers between 1880 and 1945, portray typical Native American stereotypes. Many feature impersonal portraits such as groups in ceremonial garb arranged outside tipis. The other two series provide a contrast: Ken Blackbird’s “Inside/Outside: Life on the Great Plains, 1993-2009” and Bently Spang’s “Tsistsistas Summer, 2010” offer personal narratives of contemporary Native American life.

Spang created his series for the “Tipi” exhibition. Through the photographs, viewers accompany Spang on his journey home to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in southeastern Montana. While there, he joins the annual family ride to the site of the Battle of Little Bighorn to commemorate the death of his ancestor, Limber Bones. A Spang family reunion features an all-night barbecue followed by a daytime celebration. Spang goes riding in pine forests and takes part in the Ashland Labor Day Powwow.

While most of the photographs are documentary in nature, a few poetically sum up how Native life has changed. In one of Spang’s images, a basketball lies on the grass between the shadows of a tipi and a basketball net. In some of Blackbird’s photographs, Native American riders at the rodeo and on the range have traded their historic dress for jeans and hooded sweatshirts. The horses in one image morph into cars parked outside tipis in the next.

Visitors might like to savor the exhibition in conjunction with supplementary talks at the museum. A panel discussion, “Tales of the Tipi” (featuring Spang and others), will be at 2 p.m. this Saturday, Feb. 19. A museum guide will give a tour of the exhibition at 3 p.m. Feb. 19, 25 and 26. And next month, a panel of Plains women artists will discuss the relationship between their craft and their identity as Native American women at 2 p.m. on March 19.