Washington ? With beating drums and tears of joy, tribes joined the Smithsonian Institution in opening a grand showcase museum Tuesday dedicated to American Indians.

More than 20,000 American Indians led an opening procession to the museum on the National Mall. There were Cheyenne chiefs in eagle-feather headdresses, Hopis wrapped in black-and-red weavings, Ojibwe men chanting to ceremonial drums, Seminole women in colorful dresses, and hundreds more proud and emotional tribes, all gathered under a bright blue sky.

“I just can’t get over the feeling I have right now,” said Leroy Silva, a Haskell Indian Nations University senior who marched with his tribe, Pueblo of Laguna. “The gathering of all these native people and all the non-natives who actually came out to see our traditions — everything is beautiful.”

Kansas connections

He was among a group with ties to Haskell, Kansas University and Lawrence, Kan., who gathered Tuesday morning for the grand opening of the National Museum of the American Indian.

Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., a chief in the Northern Cheyenne tribe, noted that Washington already had hundreds of monuments and statues, but until now, none were dedicated to the America’s earliest people.

“This magnificent structure, which we’re going to open today, is that monument,” Campbell told the cheering audience. “And in it, we will tell our story.”

The opening ceremony also included remarks from Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo, Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, and the museum’s founding director, W. Richard West Jr.

West is the son of the late Walter Richard West Sr., an American Indian master artist who taught at Haskell in the 1970s and was chairman of its art department.

W. Richard West Jr., left, a Southern Cheyenne, who is founding director of the Smithsonian Institution's new National Museum of the American Indian, and Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., a Northern Cheyenne, participate in the dedication ceremonies for the museum on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. West, whose father, Walter Richard West Sr., taught art at Haskell Indian Nations University in the 1970s, spoke Tuesday.

Weeklong celebration

The events continue until Sunday, with a festival featuring singers, artists and bands.

A contingent from KU’s Center for Indigenous Nations Studies also marched in the procession. Bobbi Rahder, a faculty member at the center, brought a group of six students that made a banner for the procession.

“I like to think I was part of history,” said Mary Lettau, a second-year graduate student at the center and a member of the Cherokee Nation. “This is the first time so many natives have come together and have been heard.”

“It’s giving me tingles,” she added. “I’m just amazed to be in the presence of so many native people.”

Silva, who has represented Haskell at several functions as “Mr. Haskell,” was joined at the ceremony by Shawna Douma, last year’s “Ms. Haskell” and a junior at the university.

Both said they had been wearing Haskell shirts around Washington and had been stopped by several people saying they had attended the school or had relatives who attended. Many asked for updates on the university.

“There were some people who had graduated in the 1950s,” Silva said. “They wanted to know how the school was doing since they hadn’t been there for a while.”

‘Very impressed’

Jerry Tuckwin, who retired from Haskell as a longtime athletic director and instructor, said he got a quick peek at the museum during a reception Monday night.

“We were very, very impressed,” he said. “The word that came to most of our native people’s lips was ‘awesome.'”

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The $214 million museum, with a distinctive curved limestone exterior, sits between the U.S. Capitol and the National Air and Space Museum.

It features a collection of 800,000 American Indian art and cultural objects and a photographic archive of 125,000 images. Exhibits span a 10,000-year period and represent more than 1,000 indigenous communities in the Western Hemisphere.

The museum is intended to fill a void in the broader understanding of American Indian culture but also carries emotional power for native people, whose searing history includes centuries of extermination, relocation, disease and neglect. Once numbering perhaps 50 million across North and South America, Campbell said, the American Indian population plunged to near-oblivion a century ago.

Now, with 4.3 million American Indians living in the United States alone, Campbell said he was reminded of an old Hopi prophecy that foretold a rebirth and revival.

Fredina Drye-Romero, left, and her mother, Aletha Tom, both of Lawrence, attend the dedication of the National Museum of the American Indian, seen in the background. Drye-Romero, a member of the Southern Paiute tribe in Arizona and graduate of Haskell Indian Nations University and Kansas University, wore an outfit that has been in her family for years Tuesday in the Native Nations procession in Washington, D.C.

“That re-emergence of the native people has come true,” he said.

Present, not past

The museum’s exhibits focus mostly on American Indian cultures of today, not the past, in hopes of reminding non-American Indian visitors of one important message: They’re still here.

Silva said he hoped the museum would help educate non-natives about the variety of indigenous nations.

“People get stuck with the mindset that there’s only one tribe,” he said. “Today, you see that there are hundreds of indigenous nations all around the world. I think this museum is going to be a good place to educate non-natives on our history, our cultural background and get out of that mindset that we’re all just one tribe.”

For Fredina Drye-Romero, an academic adviser at Haskell and a member of the Southern Paiute tribe, the grand opening of the museum is a bright spot in an otherwise sad history of her people.

“This is something of celebration now,” she said. “Our past is very grim, it’s not anything to be happy about, but our future is bright.”

— J-W wire services contributed to this report.