The Denver Art Museum’s Indigenous Arts of North America Collection is one of the things that sets it apart from other major cultural institutions. The museum’s holdings are among the best in the world — and for solid reasons.

As the museum likes to point out, it was ahead of the game. For many years, it was the only serious museum acquiring objects originated by members of Indian tribes, and its location — in the West, on and near lands where Native people have thrived for centuries — gave it access to a wealth of wares, and at affordable prices.

It helped, too, that many local collectors over the last century had a passion for this specific category of art, and their support and donations enhanced the assemblage to a point where the inventory now exceeds 18,000 pieces.

That foresight pays off particularly well in the current era, when it has become trendy for museums to play up work by Indigenous artists. Through both acquisitions and exhibitions, other big institutions are scrambling to make up for all that time lost when they undervalued Native American culture. DAM already has the goods.

In some ways, this collection is different than other collections at the museum, mainly because it contains a relatively wide variety of objects that reflect how Indian tribes express their creativity. For example, DAM’s European holdings rely mostly on paintings. Its Asian collections are heavy on ceramics.

But the Indigenous collection has those things and more: wall textiles, baskets, jewelry, musical instruments, sculpture, fashion, blankets, photography, ceremonial trappings. It has practical objects like shoes, but also intellectual offerings, like abstract paintings. DAM has always been more open-minded about what constitutes “art” worth collecting when it comes to Native objects.

The new arrangement of the museum’s holdings — unveiled last month as the semi-permanent exhibition “Sustained!: The Persistent Genius of Indigenous Art” — aims to help visitors make sense of this broad range of work. It tries to put everything in context, dividing up objects along the lines of how they were meant to be used when they were made.

With the help of a committee of community advisers, that came down to three categories: beauty, connections and spirituality, and so “Sustained!” is organized into this trio of sections.

That strategy is not fully effective, mostly because all of the objects in each of the sections seem to defy the strict categorization imposed upon them. That is to say, everything is, at least in some way, beautiful, and all of the works clearly have a role in community life. The overlap is so great that it is hard to tell when one section stops and the next starts, and so the organization itself, and trying to navigate the rolling signage, can be distracting.