Events

May 2007

“Sacred Legacy: Edward Curtis and the North American Indian” Photography Exhibit Opens at Regional Museum, Koper, May 8

The “Sacred Legacy: Edward Curtis and the North American Indian” photography exhibit was opened on May 8 at the Koper Regional Museum to the music of Keith Secola and the Wildband of Indians band. 
The exhibition, a joint project by the U.S. Embassy, the Regional Museum, and the American Corner at the University of Primorska, captures the broad and extraordinary diversity among the North American tribes from the Northwest Coast to the Southwest and the Great Plains.  The exhibition is also a tribute to Edward Curtis and his life’s work.  It took Curtis twenty-four years to complete the project, at the end of which he had lost his family, his health, and his wealth.  However, with the assistance and patronage of several preeminent individuals, including J.P. Morgan, Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie, and the kings of both England and Belgium, Curtis succeeded in creating a photo-ethnographic study, The North American Indian, that was widely hailed as the finest and most ambitious set of limited-edition books ever made in America by a single man.  In 1911, the New York Herald said that it was the most gigantic undertaking since the publication of the King James Edition of the Bible.

Keith Secola is a contemporary Native American folk and blues musician and a six-time Native American Music Awards winner.  His famous song, "NDN Kars,” is considered the contemporary Native American anthem and is the most requested song on Native radio in the US and Canada.  Keith Secola is Anishinabe, or Ojibwa, the tribe with whom Slovenian Bishop Friderik Baraga lived in the mid-nineteenth century. 

The exhibition will run at the Regional Museum in Koper from May 8 to June 1, 2007.

Keith Secola and the Wildband play at the opening of the Sacred Legacy exhibit

American Corner Head Breda BisÄ?ak welcomes guests to the exhibit

Native American music and photographs