Indian history takes its place at Smithsonian
By Faith Bremner
Gannett News Service
WASHINGTON — Allen Pinkham was driving through southern Idaho in the 1960s when he stopped for gas and saw a display of Indian skulls.
Gannett News Service
He still remembers his outrage.
More than 11,000 Indians representing 415 tribes were expected to participate in opening-day ceremonies today at the Smithsonian's National Museum of The American Indian in Washington, D.C.
"I said, 'How can these white people be so unjust and uncaring about American Indians that they would display our skulls in a gas station?' " said Pinkham, a member of Idaho's Nez Perce tribe.
But it wasn't just gas stations. Museums, too, over the years have had their share of inappropriate Indian displays.
That won't be the case when the Smithsonian's new National Museum of the American Indian opens today in Washington just steps away from the Capitol.
Indians from across the Western Hemisphere helped design the building and its landscaping, create its exhibits and choose many of the objects that will be displayed. Fourteen of the museum's 23 trustees, including Pinkham, are Indians.
"This is truly our museum," said Tex Hall, president of the National Congress of American Indians and chairman of North Dakota's Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation.
More than 11,000 Indians representing 415 tribes are expected to participate in opening day ceremonies.
Officials expect the museum to draw 4 million visitors a year, which would make it the Smithsonian's third-most-popular museum after the Air and Space and Natural History museums.
Exhibits will display about 7,000 items that span 10,000 years and an area from the Arctic Circle to the tip of South America.
But the museum will not be a home for dusty artifacts. It will also feature music, dancing, contemporary art and boat-building exhibitions.
"We want it to be a living museum," said Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., a Northern Cheyenne who was instrumental in starting the museum and whose jewelry will be on display.
"For years and years, movies and periodicals all took the position that Indians were sub-human, terrible, wanton savages, which is totally untrue," Campbell said. "Our problem is, the real story of American Indians has never been told."
Coverage of Hawai'i residents in Washington for the museum's opening ceremonies, including a parade of the "First Nations." Learn more: National Museum of the American Indian: www.nmai.si.edu
Now the story can be told that native Americans have long had sophisticated cultures and communities, said the museum's director, W. Richard West Jr.
In tomorrow's Advertiser
During the Middle Ages, a city called Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis, had 50,000 people —much larger than London was at the time, West said.
"How many know ... that during approximately the same period of history, the knowledge of astronomy and geometry in several native civilizations in North and South America matched or exceeded anything known in Western Europe?" he asked.
The story of American Indians is being told with the help of a quirky white man from New York, George Gustav Heye, who was obsessed with collecting Indian objects. Heir to an oil fortune, Heye accumulated 800,000 Indian objects before his death in 1957, sometimes displaying the lack of sensitivity that so outraged Pinkham.
Pinkham and others say there's little doubt Heye's collection, which makes up the bulk of the museum's artifacts, included items taken from Indian graves.
"Most (acquisitions) were honest. You went up to Indian people and said, 'I'll pay you $10 or $15 for the shirt on your back,' " Pinkham said. "But if you accept and purchase things taken out of graves, that's not right."
Gannett News Service
Under federal law, the Smithsonian must return human remains and sacred objects if tribes ask for them. The museum already has returned a white buffalo robe and ceremonial potlatch objects to Canadian tribes, Pinkham said.
Many of the displays at the museum will be interactive, officials say. Exhibits also will feature dancing, music and contemporary art.
"It's important to remember some of the context under which he was collecting initially," said the museum's director of public affairs, Thomas Sweeney, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. "It was at a time when the common national perception was that American Indians were vanishing."
Demographers estimate that between 6 million and 9 million Indians lived in what became the United States when Christopher Columbus arrived. By 1900, barely 250,000 had survived.
In the 2000 census, 2.5 million Americans identified themselves as Indians.
The story that the Indian museum will tell is one of survival and triumph. The three permanent exhibits will examine themes common to all Indian people:
• "Our Universes" — the spiritual relationship between humans and their universe;
• "Our Peoples" — the survival of native people in the face of the European onslaught;
• "Our Lives" — how Indians maintain their distinct communities in a modern world.
Each exhibit will be illustrated with objects and information from eight Indian communities.
Visitors will learn about tribal world views by literally stepping into the displays and experiencing them, said Bruce Bernstein, assistant director for cultural resources.
In the Our Peoples' exhibit, visitors will learn that the Eastern Band of Cherokees escaped the federal government-imposed forced march from the American southeast to Oklahoma in the 1830s along what's known as the Trail of Tears.
Today, thanks to their casino, tribal members are returning to live and work on their reservation in North Carolina. Youngsters are learning their native tongue in the tribe's childcare center.
Marie Junaluska, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokees' tribal council, said she hopes museum visitors will learn who the Cherokees are.
"We're in the history books a little bit," she said.
"We want people to know we're still here and we didn't go away."
