This article features Anya Montiel’s work as a curator and how she strives to highlight Native American history through art and craft.

As a curator at two museums at once, Anya Montiel occupies a rare position at the Smithsonian. She works as the curator of American and Native American women’s art and craft. This is a joint position between the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). Montiel ensures Native American women’s history is included by acquiring artworks for the museums’ collections, writing scholarly publications, and organizing exhibitions, and more.
What is it like to work for both the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian?
Working between two museums has been really rewarding, because I am able to assist with projects and exhibitions at both. Also, I have proposed new art acquisitions for the two museums. For example, SAAM and NMAI have acquired face masks made by Native artists of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Those masks will help future visitors understand responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Maybe these masks will be seen by people 100 years from now!

To share these masks with the public, I wrote about the face masks for SAAM’s blog and spoke about them in an online program organized by SAAM with two Smithsonian curators from the National Museum of American History and the NMAI. We spoke about the medical history of face masks and the impact of COVID-19 on Indigenous communities in the United States. These are some of many ways we are sharing our work with visitors during the pandemic.
What’s one women’s history story you wish more people knew?
At NMAI, there’s a statue inside the museum, called “Allies in War, Partners in Peace.” The bronze statue depicts three people, with a woman in the center. I was a lead cultural interpreter at the NMAI beginning in 2007. I led daily tours of the exhibitions to the public and school groups. When I stopped at this statue, visitors would often assume the woman was Pocahontas. When you ask people about Native American women, many only know the name Pocahontas—and maybe Sacagawea.
They don’t know that there have been countless Native women who shaped American history. The woman in the statue is Polly Cooper of the Oneida nation. She traveled more than 400 miles from central New York to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, during the Revolutionary War, to deliver food to General George Washington’s starving troops. She wanted to make sure that all the soldiers were fed. The Colonial Army tried to pay her for her service, but she refused. She did accept a gift of a shawl and bonnet from Martha Washington. Polly Cooper’s descendants continue to treasure those gifts hundreds of years later. Once visitors learned about her, they realized how much is missing from history books about the contributions of Native American women and women in general.
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