Over twenty-five thousand American Indians from over five hundred Indigenous nations journeyed from their homes to the National Mall in Washington DC to witness the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) on September 25, 2005. They journeyed to participate in the largest gathering of Native peoples in modern history, to celebrate a symbolic moment in the long, long histories of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, and to honor their own survivance. As one of those visitors, this author describes her visit to the NMAI, and the significance of the journey--a journey away from an old paradigm and toward a new one, a journey to a place designed by Natives to celebrate living Native cultures. (Contains 28 endnotes.)