Museums - Nomad Museum of Tribal Body Adornment

The Nomad Museum opened in Bend, Oregon, in 1998. It plans to move to a permanent location in the summer of 2007. Its collection examines body adornment and includes earrings, ear plugs, septum ornaments, and labrets. In addition, there are necklaces, masks, skirts, penis gourds, and related objects of personal ornament. The core of the museum’s artifacts was collected by the director’s grandmother, Dr. Naomi M. Coval, and his mentor, Father Daniel Jensen, during the 1930s through the 1960s. Both traveled extensively throughout the world and visited or lived among countless indigenous peoples.
The museum showcases jewelry and related personal finery from dozens of the world’s notable adorned cultures. It features an extensive collection of pre-Columbian jewelry fabricated in gold, silver, copper, wood, jade, and obsidian, as well as four archaic Chinese jade ear plugs dating from 3000 BC. Nearly all of the museum’s 500 items of adornment are on display, but unconserved media, including hundreds of reels of super 8 and 16 mm footage documenting now-extinct cultures filmed by Dr. Coval in the ‘50s and ‘60s is in storage waiting for resources that will allow them to be archived and preserved.