The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) is dedicated to acting as a resource for the hemisphere's Native communities and to serving the greater public as an honest and thoughtful conduit to Native cultures—present and past—in all their richness, depth, and diversity. The museum’s website provides educators and others with access to the NMAI’s growing annotated
Index of Resources, which includes online exhibitions, posters, video, and other media organized by geographic region. Teaching materials developed by the museum for use in schools are listed by region or tribe and by theme under
Classroom Lessons.
Teaching Resources
Each year, the Smithsonian honors American Indian Heritage Month with a calendar full of activities. Visit the American Indian Heritage Month website each November for more information on the events in the Washington, DC area.
If you’re interested in that broadest of all musical categories, “world music,” you won’t find a better site than Smithsonian Global Sound, which contains 40,000 tracks from the Smithsonian Folkways archives. Albums and individual songs are available for purchase and download. For American Indian Heritage Month, Global Sound offers free audio tracks and videos featuring Native communities from the Arctic to the Andes. Lesson plans and student activities are included.
Take a virtual journey to meet American Indians of the 1830s with artist, ethnologist, and showman George Catlin. This site compiles paintings, historical documents, and commentary from contemporary experts so you can explore the intersections of two cultures, both in Catlin's time and today. 
Detailed information on National Museum of the American Indian current, upcoming, and past exhibitions, including links to online exhibition sites, is available via the Exhibitions section of the museum’s website. 
Explore the history of northern peoples, cultures, and environments and the issues that matter to northern residents today.
The website shows how textile design, materials, and techniques reflect Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo cultures and their interactions. 
Students will use artifacts to learn to interpret the traditional culture of the Bering Sea Eskimo People. 
Buffalo hide paintings tell stories passed from generation to generation recording the role of the buffalo in the lives of the American Indians of the northern plains. 
The National Museum of Natural History's Anthropology Outreach Office webpage features educational activities and links to information about Native Americans including Native American languages, healing and medicine, rituals and religion, and games. 
Camping with the Sioux: Fieldwork Diary of Alice Cunningham Fletcher features the folktales and photographs Alice Flechter collected to record the Sioux ways of life. 
The Encyclopedia Smithsonian features a wealth of information about American Indians. Visitors can browse the “History and Culture” section, or narrow their results by using “American Indian” or “Native American” as a keyword search.