February 11, 2004

It has taken only a bit more than 200 years to build a native place on the National Mall.

Jokes about government bureaucracy and red tape aside, the two decades it has taken to actually establish a museum for native heritage has to be a record, even for the U.S. government.

Native peoples have traveled to Washington, D.C., in droves from its beginning, seeking justice, recognition and basic considerations for their communities. Our ancestors trekked in delegations to the city of the Great White Father.

Historical "before" photos show them dressed in traditional regalia. "After" photos show them dressed in modern Western clothing.

The notion that changing clothing would change native people and their culture goes to the heart of the often pathological relationship between native people and the United States.

Washington, D.C., in many ways, has come to symbolize these historical and cultural differences. How divinely ironic and poetic it is, then, that the National Museum of the American Indian will occupy one of the most prime sites on the Mall.

This 16th museum of the Smithsonian Institute promises to be a true native place, designed and curated by native people. W. Richard West, Cheyenne, the director of the National Museum of the American Indian, insists "no subject will be dodged."

That is a tall promise. The eyes and ears of Native America will be fixed on the museums activities as it opens this fall. After all, native people have extensive experience seeing our history dodged, whitewashed, romanticized and, worst of all, denied.

The museum world has often served as an apologist for a culture that declared us unfortunate victims of an inexorable but righteous "Manifest Destiny." Museum curators sometimes put our ancestors' remains, funerary and ceremonial objects on display alongside other archaeological animal finds, furthering the notion that we were part of a long dead, barely human, past.

Placing our culture behind glass shows how easy it has been for mainstream America to ignore the genocide upon which this country was built.

For many native people, one of the most exciting and emotional aspects of the museum is not the grand structure on the Mall, but the museum's power, under the 1998 National Museum of the American Indian Act and Amendment to return "Indian human remains and associated Indian funerary objects to descendants or tribes."

The repatriation will include the more than 18,000 Indian human remains from archeological excavations, as well as from battlefields and burial sites that were sent to the Army Medical Museum and later transferred to the Smithsonian Institute.

The museum will also include a Cultural Resource Center in Suitland, Md., where native people can use items in the museum's collection for study and worship. This notion of a living museum that is actively part of, and accessible to, a community is incomparably "Indian" in its approach. Director West calls it "cultural continuance."

At the basis of native philosophy is the constancy of change and the interconnected nature of life. As I once heard an elder remark, "a culture that doesn't change is a culture that dies." These concepts were far too sophisticated for early European settlers and were troublesome barriers to their single-minded goal of material gain.

Cunningly, they chose instead to dismiss native beliefs as primitive and simplistic. This arrogant attitude served the Europeans as they subdued the peoples and grabbed the resources of this land.

Public support of the National Museum of the American Indian reflects a glimmer of hope that America is open to reexamining the underlying wisdom of this path.

Native people are stepping out from behind the museum glass to offer this country important and vital knowledge. My great hope is that America will hear it.

Mary Annette Pember, Red Cliff Ojibwe, is past president of the Native American Journalists Association. She is currently lives and works as an independent journalist in Cincinnati. She can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.