NEW PORTLAND — Growing up, it was all polkas and a frightful Eastern Bloc turnip soup.

Nowetah Cyr’s father was from Czechoslovakia, and her family only talked about and celebrated his heritage.

Then as a teen, she discovered her great-great-great-grandparents were St. Francis Abenaki. She learned everything she could.

At 22, Cyr opened an Indian heritage museum in her living room in Clinton, Connecticut, and turned a former tool shed into a gift shop. She hosted school kids and scout groups.

“There was such a thirst for knowledge of Indians, especially in New England,” she said.

The museum moved to very rural Maine when she did in the 1970s. It turned 50 this year. It’s free, open daily, even Christmas.

And inside, it’s overwhelming.

Raccoon skull dance stick from the Ponca Indian tribe of Oklahoma. Sun Journal photo by Daryn Slover

Nowetah’s American Indian Museum and Gift Store has thousands of artifacts in two modest rooms from two dozen tribes spanning Canada to South America. They include 800 Maine-made baskets, animal pelts free for the petting, two canoes, a little stick sap skimmer, beaded moccasins, beaded dolls, beaded everything, porcupine quill boxes, ceremonial skulls, peace pipes, even a buffalo bladder.

“You just blow it (up) like you would a balloon,” Cyr said of the latter. “I Listerined my mouth afterwards.”

Her motivation, she said, has really been about preserving and celebrating heritage.

“I used to have people come in my shop all the time, ‘Oh, Indians, I thought they’re only out West,'” Cyr said. “People weren’t even aware; one thing led to another and it just blossomed.”

The collection started modestly. After learning about her own background, which she also traces to the Paugussett Indians, she and her brother would carefully spend whatever money they came into.

“We’d peddle our bikes to the antique shops and we’d buy little arrow heads or anything you could,” Cyr said.

In her 20s, she attended a naming ceremony at a local powwow and received the name Nowetah, which she says means “beautiful flower” in Sioux. She also volunteered for a nature group that sent her all over the country doing research on frogs, toads, salamanders and snakes.

“Nobody paid for food, gas or lodging, so I would take a tent and I’d just camp everywhere,” Cyr said. She’d work in side trips where “I would load up the old station wagon with Indian things from the (nearby) reservation and at that time, things were so inexpensive.”

It’s how she built up much of the museum’s collection, though she and her husband of 12 years, Tom, enjoy antiquing and adding to it when they can get away. Occasionally, visitors contribute, too.

About three years ago, a man moving from Texas to New Hampshire to be closer to his son pulled up with boxes that included old pottery and a child’s doll that had been made in Wyoming by a grandmother with the grandmother’s own hair.

“He absolutely loved what we were doing, the fact that it was free, because everybody charges for everything,” said Cyr. “He said, ‘My kids don’t want it, they’re not interested.'”

Some artifact backstories are unexpectedly personal. She’s heard visitors point to a black bear hide and gripe, “Look at that, they killed a bear just to put it on the wall.”

Not so, said Cyr. After her first marriage ended, she was a single mother with seven daughters. A pair of men from Lewiston hunting on nearby Freeman Ridge heard she could use the meat and brought the bear over.

“People don’t know,” she said. “We really ate it. I cooked it in a Dutch oven pot on the wood stove. It was so delicious and so fork tender.”

A little rectangular tag hangs off each of the thousands of museum artifacts, all by Cyr, detailing the tribe, item’s use, material and year. She keeps her own research library upstairs.

“Some people come in and spend 2 to 3 hours, they read every tag,” she said. “Everybody remarks on my handwriting.”

The museum doesn’t get hordes of visitors — 2,000 to 3,000 people pull into their long dirt driveway by the sign on Route 27 every year. Most heard about it from someone. A fair number say they’ve passed by for decades and finally decided to come in.

The level of enthusiasm hasn’t dimmed their passion, and after 50 years as a museum proprietor, Cyr is in fact ready for more.

She’s got a second museum planned for next door, devoted to Barbie dolls, but its opening is a few years off yet.

“I’ve got 3,000 dolls I’ve just got to get labeled,” she said.

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