Igloolik on display in Washington

Thousands of native Americans joined a ceremonial procession on Tuesday to mark the opening of the Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C..

The museum is a $219 million USD, rounded, rock-faced building by architect Douglas Cardinal, who also designed the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa.

Devoted to the native peoples of North, South and Central America, the new museum is the largest of its kind in the world, with 800,000 objects, 30,000 of which come from Canada.

Some 8,000 objects are on display in permanent exhibits, which include one on cosmology called “Our Universes,” another on history, “Our Peoples,” and a third on the way native communities live now, “Our Lives.”

The exhibits, put together with collaboration from 24 tribes and native communities, including Igloolik in Nunavut, are intended to show native communities as living and vital rather than dead civilisations.

Objects on display from Igloolik include caribou clothing, sealskin boots, a wooden toy snowmobile and a DVD of Igloolik Isuma’s film, Atanarjuat: the Fast Runner.

The festivities around the museum’s opening continue through this weekend and include performances by Nukariik, the Ottawa-based throatsinging duo of Karin and Kathy Kettler, and Pamyua, featuring Phillip Blanchette and Karina Moller, from Alaska and Greenland.

Some four million visitors are expected to attend the museum every year.

The opening, despite the colourful and mainly positive publicity it generated, has been dogged by disputes, including a lawsuit launched by Douglas Cardinal who claims he hasn’t fully been paid for his design work, and complaints that Native Americans still live in substandard conditions, with poor housing and social problems.