Stepping into the Museum
of the American Indian
June 25, 2005
The Museum of the American Indian tries to speak a word for moving water. It is a stately stone building, but without the classical columns and lines of the other museums on the mall. Effort is instead expended to suggest movement.. the exterior and interior lines undulate and flow. And if you missed the point there is a small natural pond out in front of the museum, a little green spot beyond which one can only just glimpse the outlines of parked cars and buses.
A museum dedicated to the experience of Native Americans was a good idea, but the problem with building a museum in Washington is that one is forced by the very location to say something about the whole experience of American Indians. I found myself longing for some narrowed focus.. Plains Indians and their culture and history, say. But the museum is content to present its topic through a wide angle lens.
We began on the fourth floor with the room dedicated to the history of American Indians. The opening selection of carved masks and representations of human faces was a grouping that implicitly asked the visitor to imagine native experience as a single unit. It was possible to consult a little notebook and learn the origin of those different artistic representations, but that was rather like looking to the back of a book for an obscure endnote.. not part of the expected process of seeing the museum.
That wall of masks and faces morphed into a wall of gold, giving one motivation for Western contacts.. and then a wall of translated Bibles aimed at giving the widest possible visual cue about the fraught relationships of native cultures with Christianity. A row of guns from the earliest muskets to modern uzis made another broad point about armed conflicts. The problem here was not “political correctness”.. as the exhibit is not out to diminish American Indian Christian populations.. the problem is an inability to stop and develop an answer as to who these people were, what there accomplishments were, and how we know anything about them. When the exhibits turned to native religion they inevitably quoted modern American Indians summarizing their beliefs, but appeared to be ignorant of the vast difficulty in reconstructing native myths and stories.
The third floor turned to the modern experiences of American Indians. Various cultural differences were in evidence.. some lived in Alaska, others in the Southwest, others on the plains. Contemporary questions that face American Indians were tackled.. such as the debate about casinos. But despite differences in place and opinion, it was clear that these remnant communities faced similar issues, and in some sense are developing a single cultural identity.
The museum’s portrayal of the history American Indians flows from that growing identity. It is a unified past constructed for a unified present. But in this the designers would have done well to remember something about the frustrating nature of water.. Heraclitus said something once about the impossibility of stepping into the same river twice.. and surely there is some parallel American Indian wisdom. Like a stream, cultures change, get transformed, and become something different. This museum proceeds with the confidence that American Indians today are the perfect key to the American Indian at the time of that disastrous contact.. in 1492.
