The gleaming glass facade of the modern Mashantucket Pequot Museum (110 Pequot Tr., Mashantucket, 860/411-9671, www.pequotmuseum.org, 10 a.m.–4 p.m. Wed.–Sat., last admission at 3 p.m., $15 adults, $13 seniors, $10 children 6–15, free children under 6) doesn’t seem to owe much to the spirit of the Native American tribes who used to inhabit the area of southeastern Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Through the entrance and down the great escalator, however, visitors are transported back thousands of years into an immersive environment that convincingly brings alive the era before Christopher Columbus and John Winthrop. Told from the Native Americas’ perspective, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum gives moral heft to the heartbreaking story of how European settlers decimated Native American tribes through disease and played tribes off of one another.

In fact, outside New York City and Washington, this may be the best Native American museum in the country. It ought to be—heavily funded by the lucre from the Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos next door, it employs interactive touch-screen exhibits and life-sized wax figures alongside hundreds of authentic artifacts.

All of the glitz, however, is itself a facade over the center’s primary mission of researching, collecting, and preserving Native American artifacts from southern New England; the center has a collection of some 150,000 books for research.