The National Museum of the American Indian, set to open its doors on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. next September, is the concrete (actually, golden-toned limestone) version of the American Indian saying, "We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children." It will be situated on the last available space on the National Mall in between the National Air and Space Museum and the National Capital.
The museum, at 260,000 square feet, is one of three such facilities in the country dedicated to overshadowing the legends of historic tribes of the Western Hemisphere with representations of a living culture. The two other facilities -- the Gustav Heye Center in New York City and the Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Maryland -- currently serve as homes to music and dance performances, speakers, and the over 800,000 artifact collection which will be featured in the new facility,
The museum's initial exhibition, which the Smithsonian expects will generate up to 5 million visitors annually, will feature a permanent timeline and twenty-four tribes from across the Americas. The legislation to fund a national museum of the American Indian was passed almost fifteen years ago in November of 1989.
Former artist Dr. Gerald McMaster serves as head curator of the museum, and has worked extensively on the Museum of Civilization -- a similarly-themed museum featuring the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere in his native Canada -- before coming to the United States to work on this project.
According to McMaster, formation of the museum was a daunting task. "There are seven hundred to eight hundred native languages spoken in the Americas," he said, noting that there are also additional communities, tribes and dialects to represent.
Formulating the museum's message was also no small task. "It has to have a message and framework -- no curator throws together exhibits with no purpose in mind," McMaster said.
Preconceived notions about the American Indian presented an additional difficulty that needed to be addressed in the planning of the museum. "We're not set up to challenge people, but to give a sense of diversity," McMaster said. "The museum is telling a bigger story of how history has impacted native peoples. It's about peoples' relationships to communities today."
The museum is centered on three concepts. The "Our Universes" segment will cover native philosophies and cosmologies, the "Our Peoples" portion will examine native histories, and the "Our Lives" component will discuss current identities of Native Americans.
Movies presented on each of the three concepts were shot on site for twenty-two of the twenty-four communities represented in the museum's initial exhibition. The five to ten day shots were based on questions that a team of anthropologists, historians and curators compiled to elicit a narrative, and give a voice to many untold stories. There is no "script" for these movies, as all dialogue consists of the words of Native Americans themselves.
In addition to participating in the filming, representatives of American Indian tribes and communities throughout the hemisphere have been flown out to Washington D.C. since the early nineties to work on the museum's concepts, ideas and presentations.
Voice is the most important elusive principle the museum had to capture. In organizing the exhibit, McMaster says he thought of voice as "authority, perspective, representation and visuality."
"It's how people want to be represented," he said."Tribes even fight among themselves."
There is also the conflict between the way historians record something and tribes remember it. "Sometimes we are accused of "revisionism' or rewriting American history," McMaster said.
McMaster refers to classic Western movies with cowboys and Indians or early midwestern settlers and Indians to illustrate his point. In them, he said, the camera is usually in the wagon, creating fear of the cowboy or the settler of the American Indian. He notes that if the camera was instead placed in the American Indian camp watching foreign people encroach upon their homes, the perspective would be different.
"There are different ways of looking at the same moment," McMaster said.
The visuality component of voice also presented a challenge to museum organizers because the way an individual looks at something is determined by their background and culture, and will get in the way of appreciating the full narrative or story behind the object or exhibit they're viewing.
The American Indian museum seeks to look at the world through the eyes of the native peoples, especially the twenty-four communities featured in the initial exhibition. "They'll see home," McMaster said, "in the way the room is arranged, it's color sequence and layout."
Pointing out a digital countdown clock, the numbers flash 199 days, 16 hours, 25 minutes and nine seconds, McMaster remarks that the days until the grand opening on September 21, 2004 seem to be going as quickly as the seconds on the clock. "As an artist I learned that once you get involved and go once step at a time, everything becomes day to day...and at the end you realize the magnitude of the original project is almost finished."
If you'd like to learn more about the museum, buy advance tickets for its opening, learn about upcoming internship opportunities with the museum, or subscribe to the American Indian quarterly, visit http://www.nmai.si.edu.
