A Visit to the National Museum of the American Indian

Note: all photographs in this entry can be enlarged by clicking on them

I’m in Washington, D.C. this week, primarily for the National Society of Black Physicists/National Society of Hispanic Physicists joint annual meeting. However, I managed to schedule an earlier arrival so I can spend time with my dad, sister, and step-mother, who live just outside the city.

This is a strange city, and growing up here is a little bit weird. I am pretty sure I hate tourists because spending time in DC means constantly spending time in the midst of white bread Americans wandering around in shirts with the flag on them. Most of their time is spent in NW DC and a bit in NE (home to Union Station), so a lot of people miss out on the fact that DC is Chocolate City — about 80% Black.

Obviously, it is also home to the US Federal Government. This means it has some really nice buildings and some really nasty people. I flew over the Pentagon on Saturday, and I thought, “It’s a shame that such a neat architectural idea is essentially destroyed for me by its contents.”

Perhaps closest to my heart, it is home to the Smithsonian. The national museums are an amazing array of exhibitions, almost all of them freely available 364 days a year (they only close on Christmas). The National Gallery has an amazing impressionist collection. The Air & Space museum has a wonderful IMAX and planetarium. The Natural History Museum has a stunning gem collection and exhibit about planetary structure. And the American History museum has a beautiful exhibit about the Middle Passage. The Anacostia museum covers Af-Am history, although it’s underfunded. The Freer and Sackler Galleries do the ancient world. The Museum of African Art has a really cool entrance and wonderful exhibits.

It took decades, however, to recognize the importance of having a museum that focused on the history of the First Nations on this continent. The last time I was here, they had finished construction, but the lines were so long that I didn’t have time to go. I finally got a chance to go with my sister Maya, yesterday. It’s a pretty building. Here it is from the outside (taken from the side adjacent to the Air&Space Museum):

On the other side of the building, they grow and harvest corn during the appropriate seasons.

While I’m glad to see that there is an acknowledgement of Native presence, I was disappointed by how watered down the museum was. And it really felt like a tour through extinction, which was tragic and gross and grimey. Not to mention the blatant yuck sponsorship, as evidenced in this photo:

As if people of colour aren’t already disproportionately represented in the military. Plus, who wants to fight for a military that spent a significant part of the several centuries trying to kill your family?

There was also some creative (read: BULLSHIT) story telling about about Indian schools in Canada. The real story is that First Nations youth were forced to go away to boarding schools where they were sexually, physically, and psychologically abused. They were forced to abandon their language and were parted from their siblings. The travesty is so glaring that the government has been forced to recognize it in recent years, and multiple million dollar awards have been granted by the courts recently.

Oh one thing that was haHA not funny was the Andrew Jackson Peace Medal, juxtaposed with discussion of his reputation as an “Indian Fighter” (aka genocidal freaking maniac):

The most stunning piece in the museum was the photograph and description of a performance piece by artist James Luna. You can read about it here:

Here is the piece:

I think it perfectly sums up the history of the museum, of anthropology, of America, and colonialism.

There was also a great exhibit about women’s clothing across different nations, including Kiowa Women Warrior Clothing, worn by the female relatives of warriors. The bead work is stunning:

These are just a few of the photos I took, so I invite you all to look at the rest in my Picasa Web Gallery.