How is it that Native Americans can be everywhere in American life—and effectively nowhere at the same time?
That’s the question at the heart of “Americans,” a traveling exhibition from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, opening April 3 at the Cornell Creative Arts Center in Kingston through May 16. It’s a deceptively simple premise that lands with force: the idea that Native imagery saturates American culture—on food packaging, in sports mascots, across Hollywood Westerns and sitcom punchlines—while Native people themselves are often rendered abstract, historical, or invisible.
Step into the show and that contradiction becomes immediate. The exhibition opens with a dense, almost overwhelming array of familiar objects and images—advertising, product labels, pop culture ephemera—designed to trigger recognition. “Oh my goodness,” as Smithsonian representative Ali McKersie puts it, “actually I’m surrounded by Native American imagery and objects in my everyday life.”
From there, the show pivots into four foundational American stories: Thanksgiving, Pocahontas, the Trail of Tears, and the Battle of Little Bighorn. These are not presented as settled history but as evolving narratives—stories that have been reshaped, mythologized, and repurposed over time. Thanksgiving, for instance, is framed less as a fixed origin story than as a cultural construction that says as much about the present as it does about the past. Pocahontas emerges not as a Disneyfied intermediary but as a figure entangled in the economic and political machinery of early America, her story both central and deeply distorted.
The Trail of Tears is positioned as one of the most consequential—and long-sidelined—national projects in US history, while Little Bighorn becomes a case study in how defeat can be transformed into enduring mythology. In each case, the exhibition asks not just what happened, but how we’ve chosen to remember it—and why those versions persist.
Physically, the show is compact but dense: a series of modular kiosks packed with objects, images, and multimedia interactives. Visitors move through a kind of looping pathway, encountering touchscreens, short films, and hands-on elements that push beyond passive viewing. A short animated film unpacks the invention of Thanksgiving as national myth; elsewhere, everyday objects—everything from butter branding to military naming conventions—underscore how Native references have been absorbed into the fabric of American life.
The exhibition arrives in Kingston through the Smithsonian’s Museum on Main Street program, which brings major institutional shows to smaller communities. Typically planned years in advance, this installation came together in just a few weeks—an unusually fast turnaround made possible by a partnership between the Smithsonian and the Cornell Creative Arts Center. (There are four copies of this traveling exhibition currently on display across the country. Over the next six years, “Americans” will visit 140 communities in 24 states.)
That local context is part of the point. “It’s not so much Smithsonian coming to town,” McKersie says, “it’s more about these local spaces and the opportunities they can create for further community building.” Admission is free, with school visits, talks, and additional programming planned throughout the run.
The exhibition’s final section turns the question back on the audience. Visitors are invited to write reflections on postcards that become part of a growing, cumulative display—less a conclusion than an ongoing conversation.
If “Americans” succeeds, it won’t be by offering definitive answers. It will be by unsettling the ones we’ve long taken for granted—and making it harder to move through the culture without noticing what’s been there all along.
