Washington – For a few minutes on the fourth floor of the National Museum of the American Indian, I got to play tour guide.
Passing between two exhibit rooms with my friend Fanua, I called her attention to a large, bronze sculpture on display in an alcove that looks onto the Washington Memorial. The life-size artwork depicts The Great Tree of Peace, one of the most prominent symbols of the Iroquois Confederacy. I started explaining the sculpture’s elements to my friend and was soon encircled by tourists.
“Is this so you’d always know where you buried the hatchet?” asked a middle-aged white guy, grinning at his cleverness as he pointed to a weapon in the tree’s roots.
As a matter of fact, yes.
The Iroquois – or, as we call ourselves, the Haudenosaunee – are my mother’s people. I gave the man and a clutch of museum visitors a quickie lesson on the founding of the Iroquois Confederacy and formation of The Great Law of Peace. I pointed out the Two Row Wampum, our first treaty with the white newcomers, and The Three Sisters, corn, bean and squash. I spoke of the significance of the eagle, perched above, and of the bear, wolf and turtle featured with an Iroquois couple and a bronzed George Washington.
I answered as many of their questions as I could before Fanua broke in: “Sara, we’ve got to go.” The tourists were disappointed. One woman clutched at my wrist as if to stop me, but then squeezed my hand and thanked me for my time.
As we hustled to the elevator, Fanua teased me about my impromptu lecture. “Well, you certainly left them wanting more,” she said with a laugh.
There were plenty of people who lauded completion of the $219 million museum dedicated to the first inhabitants of North, South and Central America. The museum was trumpeted as a symbol of survival and an acknowledgment – finally! – of all that Indian people have contributed to history and society.
But there were plenty of others who took to enumerating the museum’s shortcomings. Critics slammed curators for simplistic scholarship and complained of a dearth of labels on exhibit items and outdoor plants. Some people thought not enough attention was paid to inter-tribal warfare or the atrocities committed against Indian nations. Some thought the museum did not represent enough tribes.
The way I look at it, the museum is but a starting point to understanding traditional beliefs and the 500-year-long relationship between Indian people and all those who later came to Turtle Island.
1% of collection displayed
Moving between the museum’s floors is like getting a crash course in Indian Country 101. Though it’s fair to predict novices won’t fully “get” all they see, it’s equally fair to say even those well-acquainted with Indian Country will walk away with new knowledge.
I did.
The museum, built on the last piece of available land on the National Mall, contains some 8,000 items – a mere 1 percent of the Smithsonian Institution’s collection of American Indian clothing, tools and other objects.
The bulk of the collection is stored at the Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Md., about a 20-minute drive from the National Mall. The museum’s smaller, sister facility is a place for advanced study, where latex-gloved visitors can handle old leather, wood and stone and flip among 125,000 photos taken in the past 150 years or so.
In the late 1890s, a young electrical engineer acquired a Navajo deerskin shirt. It was the first item in a collection that, over the next 45 years, grew into the largest private collection of Native American objects in the world.
According to a Smithsonian biography, George Gustav Heye often would buy everything in sight when he visited Indian communities throughout North and South America. He also made annual trips to Europe through the 1920s, purchasing several large collections.
Initially stored in Heye’s Madison Avenue apartment in New York City, the million-item collection was eventually moved to the Heye Foundation’s Museum of the American Indian at 155th Street and Broadway, which opened to the public in 1922. Heye served as museum director until his death in 1957.
By the mid-1970s, Heye’s foundation was failing financially, and the museum was crumbling. So began talks between the New York museum’s trustees and the Smithsonian Institution. It took more than 10 years, in 1989, before the first President Bush signed legislation establishing the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) as part of the Smithsonian Institution.
The NMAI comprises three facilities – the new museum on the Mall, the Cultural Resources Center in nearby Maryland, and, in recognition of Heye’s New York City landmark, the George Gustav Heye Center in Lower Manhattan, which opened in 1994.
The National Museum of the American Indian is situated on the Mall’s southeast corner, at the foot of the U.S. Capitol. Though it’s the newest building on the Mall, its pale-yellow Kosoto stone and curved lines somehow make it appear much older than the granite and marble edifices that surround it.
The museum’s 4.25-acre site is planted with hundreds of indigenous species. The plants, along with large rocks and water features, create four distinct environments – a wetland, a cropland, a meadow and a hardwood forest.
Inside, organic materials – stone, wood and metal – also predominate. There are two theaters, two gift shops and three permanent collections, one each to represent Indian cosmology, history and contemporary life. There’s also a large, multimedia education center and a cafe serving food inspired by traditional dishes.
On the third floor, as I stood before a wall of video monitors inside the entrance to the “Our Lives” exhibit, I watched a blond girl, deep in concentration, scribble on a little pad.
“Alawna’s been most diligent with her notes – she’s absorbed 100 percent in the experience,” said her dad, Chai Voelker, 53. An Alaskan fisherman who was temporarily living in Pittsburgh to care for his sick father, Voelker pulled his 11-year-old out of school to attend the opening, promising her teachers she would write an essay on her return.
“I wanted her to get a depth and an understanding that she’s not going to get in a classroom,” said Voelker.
“We need the Indians – we wouldn’t be a nation without them – and this (museum) is part of that redemption.”
Move took five years
Once a week for five years, a semi-truck – escorted by armed U.S. Marshals – made the trip from New York City to Suitland, delivering Heye’s collection, bit by bit, to the Cultural Resources Center (CRC).
All I had seen at the museum – floor-to-ceiling glass cases filled with dolls and arrowheads, awe-inspiring sculptures and beadwork, original treaties and disturbing displays of Bibles and guns – didn’t prepare me for my visit to the CRC, which opened in 1999 8 miles southeast of the capital.
It’s the main storage area that packs the real punch. I stood among rows and rows of shelves, stacked at least 12 feet high, and grasped the enormity of the collection that now belongs to the Smithsonian.
“All this stuff is so wonderful,” Sarah Thiele whispered as she carefully returned a moccasin to its tissue-lined drawer and climbed on a stool to examine a higher shelf.
Thiele, 49, is from Pedro Bay, Alaska. A Tanaina Indian and preschool teacher who now lives in Big Lake, she came to the CRC to do a bit of research. “I’m preparing to sew my daughter an Indian dress,” she said, proudly explaining that her daughter, who is to graduate from Yale University this month, asked for a traditional leather dress as her graduation gift.
“I look at all this and think, ‘Oh my gosh, how did these women do this?”‘ Thiele said. “The men hunted and all that, but the women probably made all this stuff. Except for the snowshoes.”
Four million people are expected to visit the National Museum of the American Indian each year. If the numbers hold true, the NMAI would be the third-most visited museum on the Mall, behind the National Air and Space Museum and the National Museum of Natural History.
Though it may well be a triumph that the last land on the National Mall was given to represent the continent’s first people, completion of the museum is only a baby step toward repairing centuries of cultural misunderstanding.
Bob Charlo learned that lesson leaving D.C. Charlo, a Kalispel Indian from eastern Washington who lives in Auburn, was the first person I met when I arrived on the Mall for the museum’s opening ceremony.
Charlo called me a few days after we had returned to Seattle. Turns out, his spiritual journey ended rather painfully.
He told me that before leaving Washington Dulles International Airport, he was confronted by a security supervisor who refused to allow him to carry his eagle-feather fan through the metal detector, as he had done when he left Seattle. Trying to explain the fan’s spiritual significance to the man was an exercise in frustration, Charlo said.
Charlo tried to talk to the man about the American Indian Religious Freedom Act but finally relented, wrapping the fan in his jacket to protect it inside the baggage scanner.
At the other end, “something happened as I was unrolling my jacket,” Charlo said, his voice choked. “My eagle feather fan dropped on the floor.”
Dropping an eagle feather is a very big deal. At a powwow, if a feather falls loose from a dancer’s hands or dress, everything stops. At least four elders are called to the dance area to say the appropriate prayers before the feather can be picked up.
Charlo’s fan is made from dozens of eagle feathers, and he’d blessed me with it that first day on the Mall. With other passengers pressing behind him, Charlo was forced to unceremoniously scoop the fan from the floor and continue to his gate.
“I felt sick to my stomach. I got on the plane, and I just prayed and prayed the whole way,” Charlo said. “When I got home, I didn’t even unload the car. I just ran inside, lit some sage and prayed over it some more.”
Charlo said he worked hard to turn his negative experience “into a positive. It came really subliminally because all of a sudden, I didn’t feel bad about the experience anymore,” he said.
Charlo said his interaction with the airport security supervisor “taught me you have to be willing to accept the ignorance of others.” Maybe the museum, he said, will help replace ignorance with understanding.
He’s hopeful that years from now people will look back on the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian and say, “For one day, they did it right – they had honor and dignity and they treated the native people with respect.”
“Now, anytime I talk about Sept. 21, 2004, it’s good to talk about it, and I smile and get that good feeling in my heart,” Charlo said. “A day like Sept. 21 will never be washed away, it will never be forgotten, because so many people shared it.”
The details
The museum is at Fourth Street and Independence Avenue Southwest, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. As with all Smithsonian Institution facilities, admission is free. The museum is open 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. daily.
The Cultural Resources Center is at 4220 Silver Hill Road in Suitland, Md. Public tours are held the last Friday of the month at 2 p.m. Reservations are required, and the 90-minute tours are limited to the first 20 adults who sign up (tours are not open to children under 18). To reserve a spot or to inquire about conducting research at the CRC, call 301-238-6624.
Housed in the historic Alexander Hamilton U.S. Customs House, the George Gustav Heye Center is at One Bowling Green in New York City. The museum is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. daily, except Thursdays, when it is open until 8 p.m.
For information, including driving directions and public transportation options, see nmai.si.edu and click on “Visitor Information.”
