The antimuseum: Indian history without a guide

Christian Century, Feb 8, 2005 by Philip Jenkins

THE NEW National Museum of the American Indian has become one of Washington, D.C.'s major tourist attractions. According to its own statements, the museum is "breathtaking ... a truly Native place."

Yet not all observers are impressed. In a devastating review, Edward Rothstein of the New York Times describes the museum's approach as gratuitous and self-indulgent, presenting "comforting homilies behind every facade": it "has packaged a self-celebratory romance." Slate's Timothy Noah describes the museum's opening last September as "the museum world's gaudiest belly flop" in 40 years, and called for the immediate resignation of the institution's director and administration. The Washington Post called it "an exercise in intellectual timidity."

In order to understand the mixed but powerful emotions stirred by the museum, one needs to realize that the Indian Museum, alone among the various Smithsonian institutions, self-consciously denies any claim to be a museum, or to record a history. It is almost an antimuseum recounting an antihistory. This radical stance tells us as much about contemporary views of remembering and representing the past as it does about the Indian cultures that are meant to be the museum's theme.

A hundred years ago, most Americans thought that Native peoples were a fact of the past, and that any surviving Indians must be part of what journalist Julian Ralph called "a dead but unburied race." Visitors to the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 could visit a living museum of "primitive" cultures from around the world, and pity those fading races in their final decades of existence. As recently as 15 years ago, tourists could visit archaeological sites in which the skeletal remains of Native Americans were displayed in their excavated graves, to the delight and horror of visiting (white) children. While stringent federal laws have now ended the vulgar bone shows, many Native activists see the same dehumanizing principles still at work in the conventional museum treatment of Indian cultures. From this perspective, Indians are treated as museum exhibits rather than as living beings: they have a past, but little present and, assuredly, no future.

It is to counteract this approach that after years of struggle the nation now possesses its spectacular new Indian Museum. Throughout, the museum asserts that Native peoples wish to be seen as a vibrant living tradition, who have the ability to tell their own story in their own voices, who wish above all to celebrate their "survivance" through a half-millennium of encounters with European civilization.

The core of the collection is the vast assemblage of artifacts collected through the early 20th century by the New York City banker George Gustave Heye. The museum itself was slow to emerge. Its appearance partly reflects the change in attitudes toward Native peoples that arose in the 1960s, which was accompanied by a powerful sense of collective guilt for the nation's numerous acts of violence and confiscation.

Also, changing attitudes toward religion and spirituality meant that Indians, once viewed as benighted savages or devil worshipers, were increasingly seen as custodians of an ancient earth-centered faith that was at least equal to the Abrahamie creeds.

By the end of the century, the stereotype of the Indian as natural mystic and sage could be found in such mainstream culture productions as the films Dances with Wolves and Pocahontas. Public sympathy for Indians justified some sweepingly generous federal measures, including the Indian Self-Determination Act of 1975, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act 1990. This last measure, NAGPRA, revolutionized the whole structure of operating museums and presenting history in the U.S., giving Native peoples a dominant voice in deciding what remains could and could not be exhibited, and (in practice) how they should be interpreted.

Also critical to the new era was the federal legalization of casino gambling in 1988, which treated what some have termed the new buffalo economy. Today, Indian "gaming" (the favored euphemism) is a $15 billion a year industry, and the tribes are hugely important political players, especially in California. Despite continuing poverty and deprivation on many reservations, many people feel that these are good times to be Indian, and the U.S. census indicates a population explosion in self-defined American Indians. The Native population grew from 524,000 in 1960 to 2.5 million by 2000.

The movement to create the National Museum originated in the late 1980s, at just the time of those other strikingly pro-Indian measures, NAGPBA and casino legalization. In fact, tens of millions of casino dollars went to fund the new museum. Against this background, we tan understand why the museum's authorities have the particular concerns and enthusiasms they do--namely a categorical insistence on Indian authenticity, on the predominance of Indian voices, and on the rejection of academic or anthropological perspectives.