Burke exhibits celebrate history of Plateau tribes

Visitors to the Burke Museum can view historical and contemporary pieces that showcase American Indian cultures of the Plateau region of eastern Washington, Idaho and Oregon.

The Burke is presenting two companion exhibits, “Peoples of the Plateau: The Indian Photographs of Lee Moorhouse, 1891-1915” and “Reflections of Home,” featuring selections from the Burke’s Plateau arts collection.

These exhibits open Saturday and run through June 8 at the museum on the University of Washington campus. They are the first exhibits to celebrate Eastern Washington Plateau culture at the Burke in more than 20 years.

“Reflections of Home” will display beautiful examples of beadwork, cradle boards, cornhusk bags, baskets, blankets and more. It also will include video interviews with tribal elders recorded by Burke staff members. Commenting on objects in the exhibit, the elders discuss the photographs and objects that include, in some cases, their own family heirlooms and ancestors.

The historic photographs on view in “Peoples of the Plateau” come from the Lee Moorhouse Collection at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma, and were taken between 1898-1915 in several areas around Eastern Washington and Oregon.

An amateur photographer and agent of the Umatilla reservation, Moorhouse took more than 9,000 pictures in and around Pendleton, Ore., while documenting the area’s cultural transition as it moved from frontier life to the modern era.

Using a large camera with dry gelatin plates, Moorhouse produced an expansive pictorial record of the area and was given wide access because of his good relations with the tribal members of the region.

Guest Curator Miles Miller, of the Yakama and Nez Perce tribes, said the exhibit means more than “We are still here.”

“It’s about tradition,” Miller said in a written statement. “It’s about memory and how artists are taught and continue to teach visual expressions of the Columbia Plateau — this place I call home.”