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The universes of the American Indian

By Michael Kilian
Tribune staff reporter
Published September 26, 2004

WASHINGTON -- The National Museum of the American Indian--which opened
Sept. 21 as the Smithsonian Institution's newest and easily most
extraordinary cultural facility--was created largely to convey two
messages.

One is that, after centuries of conflict with the white man's civilization
and the destructive forces of modern times, the native peoples of the
Western Hemisphere have somehow managed to survive with their rich and
diverse cultures intact.

The other is that the time has at long last come for the people of the
United States, who heretofore have viewed Indians in stereotypical terms
ranging from bloodthirsty savage to noble environmentalist, to truly
understand who the native peoples are and why they hold their cultures so
dear.

The museum is the last to be erected on the capital's National Mall and is
expected to draw crowds rivaling those of its popular neighbors, the
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and National Museum of Natural
History.

It is as genuinely Indian as any such institution could imaginably get. The
museum director, W. Richard West, is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho
tribes, and fully 30 percent of the museum staff is of Indian descent.
Tribal representatives from all over the country and the Western Hemisphere
were consulted about all aspects of the museum's design and content.

This is far from just another dull, square building filled with dull
collections of artifacts in glass cases. Indian civilization is represented
by infinitely more here than pottery, blankets and headdresses, as has
often been the case with other venues.

Visitors will come away from their experience here with a sense of winds
howling through Southwestern canyons and over frozen Arctic wastes, the
brightness and importance of the moon as a regulator of lives, the worship
of water and corn as life forces, and the spiritual oneness of humanity
with nature.

They will learn that the term "American Indian" embraces a vast complex of
individual cultures and "universes" involving no fewer than 150 different
languages and extending geographically from Alaska to the Straits of
Magellan.

They will see amazing art, such as the contemporary sculptures of Apache
artist Allan Houser, and learn of Indian migrations to big cities such as
Chicago, Pittsburgh and New York, where many practiced the daring calling
of ironworker in the construction of some of our most monumental buildings.

They will hear a tribal leader talk about how his ancestors used to travel
to the federal government in Washington bearing wampum and peacepipes,
adding, "Now I go with a briefcase and a couple of lawyers."

The museum building itself, located just east of the Smithsonian's National
Air and Space Museum, is worth a visit simply for its stunning architecture
and landscaping.

Created by a design team led by Blackfoot Indian architect Douglas Cardinal
of Canada, the five-story-high, 250,000-square-foot limestone structure has
the hue of a sandy, rocky mesa and a striated, curving surface with
numerous indentations and overhangs that give it the aspect of something
carved by wind and water over centuries in the American Southwest.

The surrounding grounds on its 4.25-acre site have plantings of 30,000
trees, shrubs and plants representing 150 different species indigenous to
present or former Indian habitations.

A small watercourse replicating the capital's Tiber Creek (since paved over
by Constitution Avenue) and a 6,000-square-foot wetlands, with lily ponds,
wild flowers and wild rice, adjoin the museum's entrance, which faces east
to greet the rising morning sun.

Fifteen years in the making, the museum cost $199 million, much of it
raised through contributions from some 277,000 individual donors.

Entering the building, one comes upon its most striking feature--a
120-foot-high, 100-foot in diameter atrium called the "Potomac," after the
Algonquin/Powhatan word meaning "where the goods are brought in."

Functioning as a meeting place and a stage for performances and cultural
programs, the Potomac is partially bordered by semi-circular fencing, as
one might find at an Indian village at ground level. Wall facings are of a
variety of materials, some designed to react visually with sunlight focused
through glass prisms set high in a window on the south wall.

One proceeds next via elevator to the fourth floor and the Lelawi Theater
and its continuously showing 13-minute film, "Who We Are."

Though it embraces thousands of years of Indian civilizations, the NMAI is
fully a 21st Century museum of the future, employing all manner of advanced
technologies to make its presentations lively and compelling.

This is particularly true of the multi-media Lelawi and its emotionally
moving film presentation. A circular chamber with seating around the
periphery, it features a central formation from which hang white Indian
blankets that serve as screens and large rocks on which are projected
colored lights and replications of flame.

The large circular ceiling of the Lelawi is a separate movie screen,
displaying 360-degree views of forests, canyon walls, rushing streams,
public places like Mexico City's Zocalo, and other wilderness and urban
landscapes as accompaniment to the main subject on the smaller screens.

The film is breathtaking, both in picture and in word. "We know where we
are from," says one tribal member as the sky overhead blows dark and cold
and flames play on the rocks below. "We know who we are."

Adjoining the theater is a complex, curving series of displays of Indian
"Universes," each devoted to the life, culture, philosophy and surroundings
of eight Indian communities, including New Mexico's Santa Clara Pueblo,
Canada's Anishinaabe tribe and the Lakota of South Dakota.

A member of one northern tribe explains: "We are made up of two major
classes--summer and winter people. Everyone belongs to one of these two
groups. But there is no dividing. There is just a sense. Because all of us,
whether we are winter or summer people, are seeking a good life."

Another exhibition dwells on the importance of gold to Indians in the
Western Hemisphere, both as ornamental art and as an attraction for
Christopher Columbus and other European explorers, conquerors and colonists
who destroyed so much of Indian life.

Another section, "Window on Collections: Many Hands, Many Voices," shows
the diversity of Indian art and crafts with some 3,000 objects on both the
fourth and third floors. In it one finds a spotted Hopi katsina doll, a
pair of beaded sneakers and an Eskimo rendition of the Statue of Liberty
made of sea lion intestine, sea lion hide, fur, wood and blue marbles.

Descending to the third level by means of the museum's huge, curving
central staircase, one encounters "Our Lives: Contemporary Life and
Identities."

This introduces us to a multiplicity of Indians in modern times who have
survived as a people from the days of Columbus and the Massacre at Wounded
Knee. They have become citizens of the world while retaining strong ties to
their past.

As Paul Chaat Smith of the Commanche tribe notes in introductory wall text,
"Just as they did in 1491, Native Americans today live in a land that is
ancient and modern, diverse and always changing. They number in the tens of
millions and live in the hemisphere's most remote places and its biggest
cities. They fly spacecraft and herd llamas, write software and grow
orchids, fight wars and teach chemistry. They trade stocks from Park Avenue
apartments, drive taxis through Lima's rush hour and sell shoes in Kentucky
strip malls. Modern American Indians are not shadows of their ancestors,
but their equals."

One display here, designed to look like Chicago's American Indian Center,
explains the phenomenon of Indian migration to that and other cities during
much of the 20th Century.

This is a museum devoted to culture, not history. There is a long display
case on the third floor containing a vast array of firearms used by and
against Indians in some three centuries of running battle, but little else
dealing with warfare, which was an important part of Indian life and
history.

Like the fierce Vikings, Huns, Goths and other counterparts in Europe,
Indians were indeed "savages" in their manner of warfare--especially in the
way they waged it against rival tribes. The memoirs of early French
explorer Antonie de Cadillac attest to the atrocities practiced routinely
against Indians by other Indians. Both sides in the French and Indian War
and the American Revolution used Indian allies as terror weapons against
civilian populations.

But the nobility of the native peoples and their love of nature is
unquestionable. Perhaps an exhibit might have been de-voted to these
contrasting aspects of their civilizations--as well as to the late 19th
Century policies of the U.S. government that at times amounted to genocide.

In the meantime, the temporary exhibitions in the museum's third floor
galleries are of art--the extraordinary, wind-smooth sculptures of the
Apaches' Allan Houser (originally Haozous,1914-1994) and the paintings and
woodblock art of Chippewa George Morrison (1919-2000).

Much loved in the Western art capital of Santa Fe, Houser produced such
masterpieces as "Morning Prayer" and "Reverie," on view here with
Morrison's largely abstract works through the fall of 2005.

Also on the third floor is a fully computerized resources center for
researchers and scholars.

The museum's second floor is taken up mostly by the upper level of its more
orthodox Signature Film Theater and the main museum store, whose goods
include clothing and excellent blankets, as well as recordings of Indian
music and craft items.

In addition to the Potomac atrium, the ground floor contains the main floor
of the Signature Theater, a second gift shop specializing more in art
objects and books, and the museum's unusual if somewhat expensive Mitsitam
Cafe, named for the Piscataway and Delaware word for "Let's eat."

This restaurant, which manages to look both sleekly modern and yet in
complete harmony with the building's timeless motif and natural materials,
is unique in that only Indian or Indian-style foods are served.

But these include juniper salmon, chicken tamales, pumpkin soup, quahog
clam chowder and a cheeseburger made with Buffalo meat.

Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune