Pawpaws at the National Museum of the American Indian

In late April we left Utah for about a week and went to Washington DC for a conference. During the trip, we went to the National Museum of the American Indian, one of the Smithsonians.

It's a great museum, dedicated to history and Indigenous Americans' hundreds of living cultures. A few of the things we saw during our too-brief visit:

A narrative of how Raven stole the sun.

Raven's beak with the sun in its mouth.

A cosmology.

A nice painting of some pueblos in the US Southwest, where we grow our expatriate pawpaws.

And then as we left we did a double take--pawpaw trees hanging over the sidewalk on the museum grounds!

Another pic of the fruit.

Were these trees here just randomly because this was their home range? It turned out they weren't just random but were planted "to honor the natural landscape that existed prior to European contact." Indeed, according the museum's website: "At the museum's entrance, a spectacular wetland is home to fruit-bearing paw-paw trees, lush aquatic plants and native birds, reptiles and amphibians--a serene setting that muffles the sound of the cars and trucks traveling along nearby Independence Avenue."

Here's another relevant URL, with a blog post done in Nov 2014 by, by an intern for the Archives of American Gardens. It turns out the Smithsonian Tree Collection has seventeen pawpaw trees, including these at the Museum of the American Indian.