West refuses to live in the past: W. Richard West wants the National Museum of the American Indian to be rich in history while celebrating the continuance of contemporary native communities

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 26, 2002 | by Stephen Goode

Q: How did all this influence you?

A: When my brother and I came along, all this was rolling around in dad's mind. He was retaining his Cheyenne-ness at considerable cost, and he wanted to be very sure that there was no question in the minds of his boys about who we were. This, even though we're half nonnative.

My mother, the daughter of Southern Baptist missionaries, was born in China and lived there for the first 14 years of her life. I'm sure that must have been very complicated because her family was from Mississippi, and my grandfather had serious objections to her marrying a man who in his view was a person of color. Which my father definitely was.

Obviously my mother had to come to some sort of understanding or accommodation about that. From the very beginning, my brother and I had a clear sense of our mixed ancestry and our principal cultural identification, linked with the Cheyenne side of our existence.

Q: During that period of grinding deculturalization, what happened to the Cheyenne language?

A: There was a tremendous loss of the language during that time. While my father understood a great deal of Cheyenne, he never spoke it very much with us because he didn't have the vocabulary. I never heard him speak more Cheyenne than he did at the very end of his life when he was dying of cancer. He obviously was digging way back in his memory, which often happens under those circumstances.

But language was one of the first aspects of our culture to go. I mean it was most specifically the target of Indian policy, and quite correctly so, because eliminating the languages was one of the most certain ways to deculturalize native peoples. But now there is a revival of the language and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of Cheyenne speakers. I myself have wandered back to see what I can do to learn more Cheyenne. My brother's also done that. I have certain obligations within the tribe which I would be able to meet better if I knew more of the Cheyenne language.

Q: You recently have been made a chief of the Cheyenne. How is that done?

A: It's a very long process amongst the Cheyenne. We're quite careful and circumspect about those things. The subject had been discussed for the better part of a year-and-a-half. I went out to Oklahoma in the spring and met with a number of the chiefs and society leaders. Then I went back. One of the times at which the chiefs meet formally is the Sundance, our most significant spiritual and religious ceremony. It occurs in either late June or early July, mostly late June. I went back out at that time and was sponsored for election into the Society of Chiefs. There are 44 of them--four principal chiefs and 40 others.

I was elected and what you must do to be elected, in addition to long conversations within the tepee, is to dance with the chiefs, which I did then, and smoke with the chiefs, which I did then.

Q: From what you've said, it's clear that the National Museum of the American Indian isn't to be only another Washington institution, but will have obligations wherever native communities exist in North and South America.