Both artworks and historical artifacts, items like this pouch (detail above) in 'Uncommon Legacies: Native American Art from the Peabody Essex Museum' show American Indian life and creativity. This holder for herbal medicine, hunting charms or tobacco was crafted from leather, quills, deer fur, metal and dye.

AN UNUSUAL exhibit at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts merits a visit, posthaste.

There are many reasons one should run, not walk, to see "Uncommon Legacies: Native American Art from the Peabody Essex Museum":

First, to get a glimmer of what the Americas' native peoples created in the way of clothing, containers, weapons and ritual objects;

Second, to see these precious items--each both an artwork and a historical artifact--that rarely come into public view;

Third, to take advantage of the exhibit before it packs up July 20 and heads for home on the Massachusetts seacoast.

Why, this treasure trove practically recommends itself.

And what better time to see the exhibit than now, the beginning of the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition--that Virginia-born enterprise that crossed a continent, and whose men depended so utterly on the kindness of the natives they encountered?

Viewers can appreciate each object in this exhibit purely for its beauty and craftsmanship; the patience and now-vanished expertise it took to make many of the works is mind-boggling.

If museum visitors are open and receptive, they also may leave asking all kinds of questions about native cultures and the histories of the people who lived here when Columbus and Cortez, John Smith, the Puritans and all the rest first stepped off their boats.

"Uncommon Legacies" opens up whole worlds that most us never see--and some that are gone forever.

The colorful brochure each visitor is given at the entrance to the collection makes the former point elegantly. It features six fold-out flaps, rather like an Advent calendar, each of which opens to reveal an image of an artifact from the exhibit.

Fold back the flap bearing the image of a pair of blue jeans, and you find fringed leggings made by the Eastern Sioux. Flip over the tennis shoes, and there's a pair of brightly decorated moccasins. Turn over a red parka to behold a buffalo robe from the Northern Plains, inscribed with drawings that tell of beliefs and experiences.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts borrowed items such as this sash from the Peabody Essex Museum. The sash was made in the 1820s of wool and beads.

Each object on display has its own story and, delightfully, some of those tales are still known to us 150 years or more after they were created by the people of various nations, then collected by white explorers, traders, settlers and missionaries.

It is astounding that so much about the provenance of many of the artifacts is known. That detail is due to a policy of the Peabody Essex Museum's earliest predecessor, the East India Marine Society, founded in 1799.

The society urged all of its contributors--who were initially globe-trotting sea captains based in Salem, Mass.--to keep diaries that described and explained the curiosities they were bringing back to a young republic.

Thanks to such care, more than a bit is known about the 119 pieces in this exhibit, which represent the work of some 38 American Indian tribes.

Take catalog item 102, for instance. This ornate and brightly colored baby carrier clearly shows how special infants were to that society. Resplendent with quills, beads and shells, it may have been made for Hester (Crooks) Boutwell on the birth of her first child, Elizabeth, on Aug. 4, 1835. Hester, born in 1817 to an influential fur trader and his Chippewa partner, taught at a mission on Lake Superior, married William T. Boutwell in 1834 and died at 36 in Stillwater, Minn., after bearing nine children.

As visitors enter the exhibit's first gallery, a quote from Mary Lou Fox Radulovich, director of the Ojibwa Cultural Foundation, sounds an important theme: "Indian people have no word for art. Art is a part of life, like hunting and fishing, growing food, bearing and housing children. This is art in the broadest sense giving meaning to everything."

The more you see of the exhibit, the clearer that idea becomes. It is full of wonders, from the array of moccasins--each pair strikingly different--to the brilliantly colored macaw-feather headdress from the Amazon basin, to Chippewa herbal medicine pouches fashioned of leather and quills to the antelope or mountain-goat-hide men's shirt collected in Montana's Bitterroot Mountains by missionaries in about 1840.

The exhibit, which closes July 20, includes this overcoat made in the 1820s of mammal intestine and dyed esophagus.

Take awhile to enjoy and look and read and ponder, and you'll find your own personal favorite.

In the center of the last gallery stands mine, what my companion and I regarded as the most extraordinary single object in the wonderful array. Translucent, almost luminous, it glows in the spotlights, each edge adorned with fine embroidery.

The Aleut overcoat, made of mammal intestine and dyed esophagus, was acquired by Seth Barker, master of the Boston ship Volunteer, which traded on the Northwest coast in 1824 through 1827. Clearly influenced by European styles, it is a high-collared officer's garment of a kind commissioned by fur-company and military officials as souvenirs and gifts.

This magnificent garment--fit for a potentate--was created at a time when thousands of native Alaskan people, many toiling in forced-labor camps set up by the Russian American Co. fur monopoly, were perishing from disease and inhuman working conditions.

Lest one think the cultures that created such treasures are all long-gone, two companion exhibits at the museum correct that notion. One is on Virginia's eight tribes, featuring a fine video documentary that adults and children watched raptly on a recent visit. The other is "As Long as the Waters Flow: Native Americans in the South and East," a moving assemblage of black-and-white portraits of Indians from various tribes and communities, each telling a different story.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and its partners are to be commended for hosting "Uncommon Legacies." A tour de force richly deserving of respect and reflection, this powerful exhibit stands stereotypes on their heads.

To learn about Virginia's Indians, visit the Web sites of the American Indian Resource Center at the College of William & Mary, wm.edu/AIRC, and the Virginia Council on Indians, indians.vipnet.org.