WASHINGTON – The doors of the National Museum of the American Indian were flung wide to the public Tuesday on the eve of the equinox, a sacred time for many tribes. Inside the curving stone museum, the spirits of the ancestors smiled as their children- by the thousands -returned.

From the mouths of these first Americans came stories of glory, sadness, prophesy and a promise kept: the creation of their own museum. These are the common people who lived the stories told on the walls of the national gallery, and they gathered Tuesday in a procession of tribes to walk the National Mall in praise of their past, their present and their institution.

These visits awakened memories and stories about the past for Indian people.

For example, the gallery art displayed for the public to admire is actually family photographs of a Laguna Pueblo family.

One Laguna woman pointed to a photo of a woman dressed in regalia. She remembered the very dress the woman was wearing. Another visitor said one of the portraits was of his relative. There was awe and joy among the Laguna as they saw family again.

These memories are in the collections at the national museum and the Cultural Resource Center in Suitland, Md., which houses an even larger group of artifacts and also is open to the public.

“We are touching something touched by our ancestors,” said Julie Leslie, a young Yakima woman from Washington state. The photographs and drawers, boxes and shelves full of artifacts were brought from the George Gustav Heye Center in New York, where the museum’s collection originated, and are being seen for the first time by many native people.

At the Cultural Resource Center, Indian people crowded around containers of artifacts. Each of the long, white narrow drawers bore labels warning onlookers “Not to touch.” Curators with white-gloved hands moved pieces for onlookers as they stared at the intricately and colorfully beaded warshirts, baskets and wooden box drums. Two Tlingit women from Alaska said they made the best sound of any drum.

A Crow woman from Montana looked at old bead designs. The designs are being lost, she said. Indian people who beaded them gave them meaning.

Many of the American Indian people will leave the nation’s capital with memories of the past and a feeling that they’ve finally stepped into the American mainstream. The National Museum of the American Indian helped bring them into their rightful place.

An older Crow woman remembered “half-breeds” coming to her grandmother’s house to buy things. She remembered her grandmother taking a beaded saddle down from a closet shelf and selling it to the man for $40. She didn’t like the man much, she said. She later discovered that he’d sold the saddle to a museum.

While waiting for the procession of tribes to begin, Nadeane Nelson, 85, an Indian from California, recalled childhood memories in which her people were denied citizenship and evicted from their homes.

Her mother graduated from Sherman Indian School in Riverside, Calif., in “domestic science” studies. Nelson smiled and said that meant she was taught how to clean house.

In a chance conversation, Nelson found she was related to a woman she’d never met before who happened to be sitting near her, waiting for the procession to begin. Indian country is one community that stretches from the Arctic to the Everglades of Florida.

But here in Washington, the diversity of Indian cultures is concentrated in this new museum. Yet even as artifacts were being selected for display, others made their way back home.

Joanne Morris, a former board museum member, said the board made a great effort to give items back to tribes that wanted them.

Cecil Lewis, a councilman for the Gila River tribe, thinks repatriation is proper. “Our ancestors aren’t objects, and they should be returned. I know I would want to go home,” he said.

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(c) 2004, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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PHOTOS (from KRT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): INDIANMUSEUM

AP-NY-09-21-04 2334EDT