Wigwams and wampums and long houses, oh my!

Lincoln and the rest of the 4th grade at Craig Elementary School proudly invited me to tour their Native American Museum on Friday. Linc wore a sign around his neck with his nom de guerre, Red Moon Fox. Others gave themselves equally colorful sobriquets, as was the Native American custom. I spotted a Wolf Eyes, Athletic Dog Lover, Fast Red Mountain Lion and a Winter Turquoise Moon.

Three rooms packed with individual presentations, group projects and more facts about the Iroquois, Algonquin, Mohawk, Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga and Seneca tribes than you could shake a spear at. He was really proud of it all. The photos don't show it, naturally, but he really had that "light of learning" in his eyes. Read me his entire 12-page non-fiction "book" about it and showed me all the cool stuff he and his classmates did. Lincoln's artifact in the museum was the peach pit game. Since peaches are out of season here, he halved avocado pits, baked them, and painted the flat side white. Put 'em in a bowl, shake the bowl, see how many you can get to land white side up. It's what the Native Americas did before they invented lacrosse, I guess.