Skate and Stilts

One of the components showcasing innovation is the skateboarding activity. Skateboards derive from surfboards, which are a Hawaiian and Polynesian invention. Skateboarding is hugely popular, on reservations and off, and we're using the Wii game. It's fun!


Our shop guys cut these panels on the router downstairs. They are really cool.


Closer, but not done yet. These skate decks are designed by Native artists. Panels and graphics still to come.... But those missing elements don't stop kids from playing.


The stilt house is one of the four dwellings. It is designed to show adaptation to tropical environments where flooding occurs part of the year, and those rivers then become the roads. We were lucky on this one -- we'd been tapped into an effort by the Niños de la Amazonía project. Several young people from an indigenous village in the Peruvian Amazon were given cameras to document their lives for about a year. We were able to use their images for our center. The house was built from their photos. All the graphics on the panels are their photos. Then, Sting's organization, the Rainforest Fund, agreed to pay for these remarkable young adults to travel to NY and DC, and they would be at our opening. So we'd be able to find out, Were we successful in building a stilt house in the museum?


The first piece to go up was the mural between the two rooms. This image is actually from the rainforest in Ecuador, near where I was last year. If I stand right next to it I can pretend that I'm still there....


Yup, poles. And the house starts to go up.



Progress!



And it's up! There are still pieces to come in. The teenagers, though, ran to the house and promptly took it over. They said multiple times that they felt like they were at home! We couldn't have asked for better. They helped us decorate with all the items that we purchased from the village, showing us where they should be positioned. We still have the water to put in, the toy canoe, the lights.... There's always something more!