The current featured exhibit at the Museum of Indigenous People is about Native traditions and influences related to space, astronomy, and space travel. I asked Manuel how the exhibit came together, and he got talking. I decided to get out of the way and let him tell it, lightly edited. — ed.

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It’s been in our ‘mind’s eye’ for a few years, of course not in this current evolution, but it’s something we’ve been thinking about. I’ve been a Star Wars nerd since 1977, and there was an exhibit called ‘The Force Is With Our People’ at the Museum of Northern Arizona, and I went to it and I was like, ‘yes!’ Seeing the similarities that other indigenous people see in Star Wars was so fantastic, I begged the museum director to let that exhibit travel here, but she backed off and it didn’t happen. So we said let’s do something similar, not the exact same thing, of course, we’d speak to that, but we wanted to be a bit more factual.

But what do we call it? When we’re praying, we say “the Buffalo Nation,” or “the Woman Nation,” “the Standing People” (the trees), the “Swimmers” and the “Flyers,” because for many Native people everything is alive, everything has a soul. Melanie Bernal, one of our employees here who’s Hia-Ced O’odham, suggested, “what about ‘Star Nation’ or ‘Star People?’” because when we’re praying and talking about them in ceremony, that’s how we refer to them. So, I was like, ‘that’s it!’ At the same time two podcasters, Adam England of The Backyard Astronomer and Edward Tucker of Tucker and the Beard, were talking with us about naming a star and exoplanet with indigenous names as part of this global contest. So we said the Hopi name for the sun is Dawa, and there’s a katsina called Dawa, and in Cherokee ‘noquisi’ means ’star’ … and they got excited right away.

They contacted the Jim and Linda Lee Planetarium as well as some of the staff and graduate students from the astrophysics department at Embry-Riddle. So, we had actual scientists — real space nerds, not just fantasy space nerds like me — real astrophysicists and astronomers, and then there’s me in there, and I’m thinking, “what am I doing?” But once we got rolling on the need to select a star and planet, we started going through them in the planetarium — that place is wonderful, if you’ve never been. They zoomed in on GJ 436 and 436b, and told us the planet is so close to its red-dwarf star that the heat and pressure turns the water on it to ‘hot ice.’

Wow! Mind blown, I don’t even know what to think about that, and they ask me, “Are there any stories about hot ice?” Who would come up with a story about hot ice!? But they showed me that it’s so close to its star that it has a tail, like a comet, because the atmosphere is burning off as it goes around. I said, "You know, that reminds me of this story .…"

I told a story about a warrior wanting to deliver a prayer directly to the Great Spirit. It was hard times for his people, he’s desperate, all his prayers back in the village weren’t working, so he travels. He goes into the Smoky Mountains, higher than he’s ever been, the air starts getting thin, he’s tired, and he comes across Yona, the bear. The bear says “Two-legged, what are you doing here? You don’t belong up here, you belong down in your village with your people.” The young warrior pleads with the bear, tells him the situation, how the people are suffering and starving, and he needs to deliver this prayer to the Creator.

The bear is taken aback by the story, so he takes the prayer. He goes higher than he’s ever been in the mountains, up where the trees stop growing. In the last scraggly dead tree sticking up out of the rocks, there’s an eagle’s nest. Awohali, the eagle, asks the bear, “What are you doing up here? You should be down in the forest, chasing rabbits and eating berries, you don’t belong up here.” The bear tells him what’s going on, and the eagle is also moved by the story, and says, “Give me the prayer and I’ll see what I can do.”

‘Awohali’ means ‘he flies highest,’ and he takes the prayer and flies higher and higher, higher than he’s ever been, and the highest he can get is up to the sun. And the sun looks at the eagle and says, “What are you doing up here? You don’t belong up here, you belong down in the clouds, looking for fish in the river.” The eagle explains what’s going on, and that he needs to deliver this prayer to the Great Spirit. The sun is also taken aback by this, he feels for the humans, and says, “You know, I speak with the Great Spirit every day, so give me the prayer.” The eagle gives him the prayer, and the sun says, “now give me one of your tail feathers.” Eagle reaches back, plucks out a feather and hands it to the sun. The sun kisses it on the end, and that’s why the eagle feather is white with a black tip. The sun says, “Take this back down to the Two-legged, so they’ll always know they have a direct connection with the Great Spirit.”

I told that story and they were all excited and happy with it. Josh Ballze, one of our trustees, told the story of the Man in the Maze, a very popular O’odham tradition about the journey all human beings take to get to the Creator. He connected that with a planet that orbits very, very far from its star, so Moab’dab, the Hunter, was the name he suggested for the planet, and Etoi the star, for the Creator. So we entered that one too, which I thought would win.

The International Astronomical Union went over these entries from all over the globe, in indigenous languages from everywhere, and there was only one chosen from the US, and it happens to be ours. Now the star GJ436 is named Noquisi and its planet GJ436b is Awohali. If they discover more planets in that solar system they’ll be named Yona for the bear, Kanati for the great hunter, and so on.

Even if we weren’t picked, I was interested in hearing what they have to say in Africa, in what the Sami people in northern Europe have to say, or what some of the mountain people in Asia have to say, I wanted to hear those stories too. I’m about promoting indigenous people globally. There are more languages than Latin and Greek, so let’s do this. These stories are meant to be told and shared. They’re more than entertainment, they teach values and say a lot about why we believe these things and why we feel a certain way.

So in thinking about the Ani-Noquisi exhibit, we decided to speak to how the indigenous people of Turtle Island (North America) look at the night sky and interpret the stars and the mysterious things we see moving about in it, and what it means to us on the whole and in our many individual cultures. So we have some beautiful art mixed in with some really awesome scientific charts, ethnographic and archaeological studies, and so on. Our ancestors, no matter where we come from, all looked up at the sky, a lot more than we do today. So we knew that the way the ancestors looked at things and the stories they invoked would be a focus of the exhibit.

Ani-Noquisi, ‘Star Nation,’ has more than one meaning. We are thinking literally about those twinkling things in the sky, but we’re also talking about people who go among the stars, and a lot of folks are unaware that there are indigenous astronauts. Nicole Mann, featured in the exhibit, is up on the International Space Station right now. Mary Golda Ross, who passed away in 2008, was the first Native American aerospace engineer and one of the authors of the manual for interplanetary travel that NASA compiled in the 1960s. Most people don’t think ‘Indians’ when we’re thinking about space, but the fact is that we indigenous, like everyone else, have been doing this since its inception.

See Adam England’s story on the IAU contest and the science of Noquisi and Awohali.