A Visit to the Potowatomi Cultural Center

On Friday I went up to the Potowatomi reservation with the Tribal Libraries, Archives, and Museums class. It is a good drive from Madison to Forest County, near Crandon in the north of Wisconsin. Most of the trip went pretty smoothly. We did manage to get lost in Rhinelander and learn that Google maps is not always perfect. Our main stop was at the Forest County Potowatomi Cultural Center Library and Museum. We were given a tour by Kim Wensaut, the cultural center's librarian, and Mike Alloway, the cultural center's director. The facility that they have is very new and well-equipped, and the library is an expansion from a much smaller one. In fact, it is new enough that the library still has many empty shelves waiting for books. The collection actually shrank some in the move from the old library to the new because many books that were racist and inaccurate were weeded out. Their current objective is to carefully collect materials that tell the story of the Potowatomi from a Potowatomi perspective and serve the community's needs. The first step down this path was to devise their own system for organizing the materials. In the past year Kim has been hard at work in this task had has created a system that reflects the priorities of the Potowatomi today (at the very beginning under the "A" heading is languge, reflecting their efforts to revive spoken Potowatomi among the people-- this is also reflected in the mural in the library with Potowatomi words for each of the months next to images). The museum adjoining the library is also very modern with multiple interactive video displays highlighting dances, language, and oral histories. It includes high-quality dioramas and artifacts, some on loan from the Milwaukee Public Museum.

The main challenge for the center today is educating the public on the services it provides and developing programming to increase library use. There have already been some successful programs, such as a Summer Creative Writing Workshop and the ongoing Neshnabemwen, or language classes, and it is likely that the community will become more involved as the word gets out about the services the cultural center provides.