In Focus: Traveling Exhibit Explores Night Sky and Connection to Indigenous People

Spirits Dancing: Photographs of the Night Sky is a traveling exhibit currently at the Mille Lacs Indian Museum and teaches about Indigenous star knowledge and Native Americans’ relationship with the night sky.

The inspiration for the exhibit was from the book of the same name published by the Minnesota Historical Society. The book was written by astrophysicist and artist Annette Lee and features the photography of Travis Novitsky, both of whom are of Native American descent. The book and exhibit explain Indigenous peoples’ relationships with the night sky.

“There’s just a lot of things like the Milky Way, they say, is actually where we go when we pass on. It’s really a path that the ancestors follow,” said Travis Zimmerman, Mille Lacs Indian Museum Site Manager. “And a lot of Ojibwe beliefs say that we come from the stars, that we come from from the sky, from the night sky. From the stars and from the heavens.”

The views of these photographs, when up close, are simply breathtaking. Many museum-goers hold similar feelings after viewing the exhibit.

“We’ve had a lot of people with – come in really good reviews, you know, just saying how beautiful like, you were saying, just kind of takes your breath away,” added Zimmerman. “You just really get immersed into the photo, you know? And we’ve had people come specifically once they heard this exhibit was up, you know, they came the first day.”

You can spend hours gazing upon the night sky, trying to count the stars, sharing stories of the constellations. But the name “Spirits Dancing” is a direct reference to one of nature’s most fascinating displays – the aurora borealis.

“The thing that always catches my eye is just how vibrant the colors of the night sky get,” Zimmerman said. “And I know some of that is through filters with cameras and exposure and different things like that. But, you know, that’s just what really gets me is just the beauty of the colors of the northern lights. And even the northern lights have a story and they say that those are dancers. So when you see the northern lights, that’s our ancestors dancing. And you can see the way the northern lights kind of flicker sometimes and stuff, and it kind of looks like they’re dancing.”

The exhibit will be at the museum until May 31. That night, the museum will also have a free event open to the public to close the exhibit. The exhibit’s next location will be at the Split Rock Lighthouse on the North Shore of Lake Superior.