WASHINGTON – The National Museum of the American Indian has succeeded as a Native place.
Many Native people across the nation still remember the day it opened, still speak of it mostly with enthusiasm, still plan to get there someday, and still consider it a kind of incontrovertible encouragement to the contribution of Native culture in the Americas.
For Native peoples and others sympathetic to their cultures – or even simply wary of Washington;s – it has also brought connotations of the sacred to the hardnosed nerve center of national politics.
But as a ”tourist attraction,” for lack of a better phrase, NMAI has received mixed reviews. Not unexpectedly, some within museology have questioned the coup of a ”new” museum, a museum of the present; and attendance, though respectable, has fallen short of the original high-end estimates.
A hatful of anecdotal indications suggests that for some non-Indians, the museum falters as ”a framework of further meanings,” identified by an aesthetician of the last century as the key to meaning itself; if true, this would mean at a minimum that Americans are not taking the NMAI experience home with them, talking it up to their friends and neighbors, connecting it with their daily preoccupations, modifying their mental models about the national Indian myths based on the museum visit.
The Smithsonian Institution, parent organization of NMAI, made it clear in hiring Kevin Gover that when he went to work in December 2007 as the successor to inaugural NMAI director W. Richard West, one of his tasks would be relating the indigenous story to Americans (and, of course, others) who don’t already know it.
That challenge may begin with the museum space itself, though it is only proper to note here that worlds of consideration have been devoted to the museum space. The present analysis makes no pretense of sifting those subtle pages, much less disputing them. But a few gut reactions have been encountered and should be accounted for.
Once inside, visitors walk around copper-banded panels on a basketry theme and find themselves at ”The Potomac,” a circular, open welcoming area with a dome overhead, canoes on the floor (they’re actually raised above the floor in most cases), and ample stone seating on the side. Light enters from several windows, and a prism casts bright colors high on one white wall. It’s a great space for receptions and fundraising events, but for museum-goers?
The offhand phrases used by separate people (not looking for a quarrel, they requested anonymity) to describe the Potomac room in recent months seem too much alike to be coincidence: ”Antiseptic.” ”Like a hospital waiting room.” ”Sterile.”
Only look about the room with these phrases in mind and their genesis seems clear.
The museum’s outer layer of roughcast tawny limestone, so welcome among Washington’s Enlightenment, Gothic and Modernist (not to mention merely functional) public architecture, is reduced to a few accent strips in the Potomac area. Otherwise, the walls are white.
White above the entrance, white on both sides, white all the way up at the back, and white all the way further up to the top of the dome, much of it often amplified by sunlight. The sophisticated thinking that might justify all that pallor in aesthetic terms (it’s a blank canvas, encouraging visitors to check their minds before experiencing the museum in a way they can’t anticipate, etc.), seems to be losing ground at present to a simple but potent reaction.
Gover marks it down to lack of a ”wow factor” at the entrance. ”We’re thinking a lot about the space.” There’s no problem with it really, but something more may be needed; and some good ideas are on the boards, starting with the possibility that the walkway from the entrance to the prism wall would support a ”processional” experience, perhaps with the help of bannered panels – museum lingo for the tall, rectangular panels that present graphic materials and written information in a more or less narrative manner across a number of panels.
The approach worked exceptionally well in the smaller context of a recent NMAI display on Native code talkers in wartime.
In any case, the big open space of the Potomac is a good idea, one Gover will maintain in any changes he makes to the museum space. And needless to say, perhaps, it’s never going to look like a circus.
As a reminder of the challenges in trying to please everyone, Gover points to the aforementioned copper-banded panels on a basketry theme, flanking the front semicircle of the Potomac. Just about everyone likes them … that is, everyone who knows their way at least a little bit around Indian country.
But Gover knows from experience that it’s not as successful with people who don’t think ”basketry” right off: they wonder what it is. Gover concludes that it sends a ”mixed message,” but still rates it ”successful enough.”
Now the visitor heads for the museum proper, presumably. But after wandering through the ground floor, more than one has returned to the Potomac room and said something like, ”Where’s the stuff?”
It’s doubtful most of them have any idea that this is deep water, that the museum’s material objects are considered the secondary outcomes, artistic or artifactual as the case may be, of the cultural processes that produced them. There are about 800,000 of them in the NMAI collection, but unless you’re interested in eating (the Mitsitam Cafe at the back is pretty much above criticism) or dropping a fair sum at the gift store (critics suggest the typical Washington tourist tends to go for less pricey trinkets as mementos to take back home), or taking in a performance or lecture and discussion (Rasmuson Theater), the ground floor doesn’t have a lot to offer as the usual museum goes. A few display cases, a few scattered showpieces – that’s it.
Gover isn’t too worried about that. Getting more objects onto the ground floor while maintaining plenty of open space can be accomplished by a skilled staff once decisions are made about the overall impression of the entryway.
Upon returning to the Potomac in search of ”stuff,” the NMAI visitor is apt to absorb the museum’s most topsy-turvy item of information: the museum begins on the fourth floor.
Prior to the museum’s 2004 opening, when reporters got a preview, museum staff flogged them with reminders to include in their articles some form of the sentence: ”The museum begins on the fourth floor.” The odd looks they got alone said a lot; and a selection of overheard elevator conversations since has said more.
But Gover isn’t fazed by that either. It’s a matter of establishing the context at the entryway – the museum proper does begin on the fourth floor, and people won’t be put off if the point is made to tell them so. In any case, to the bold go the spoils – the family that sticks with it, herding the stroller and older kids up four floors, will get their reward.
The museum displays remain powerful, appealing and informative. NMAI may still seek the perfect balance between swarms of unfamiliar information and overly narrated displays, between emotive culture-specific assertions and the plain conveyance of knowledge, but there is plenty to enjoy between the extremes.
Two recent additions, a Blackfeet and a Chiricahua exhibition, continue to fill out the history of the Americas, unexpected and yet abiding, giving pause for thought to all but the most ”stuff”-fixated tourist. Gover expects there will always be some tension between Native communities’ own stories and strict scholarly perspective.
Like the museum’s minor deficiencies, the larger American framework of further meanings could still use some work. And so dispelling myths about American Indians and all Native peoples remains one of the museum’s top priorities. Gover sees it happening in ways that don’t always meet the eye, in the detail that goes into exhibitions, in its outreach efforts and in three upcoming NMAI shows that can almost be taken as a triptych of the museum’s potential.
”The Scholder is almost mandatory,” Gover said, referring to the Nov. 1 opening of canvases by the late Fritz Scholder, a Luiseno painter who grew up in the non-Indian culture but later became a leader in the Native modernist art movement.
Less mandatory, but already proven provocative, is ”IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas,” a multimedia consideration of two inter-braided racial histories that are seldom explored as one. It, too, will open in November. ”That’s going to be an experience in truth-telling,” Gover remarked.
How much more so then a 2010 NMAI exhibition on treaties? ”I’m really excited about that. … When Indians present the subject of treaties, it’s going to have an edge.”
The NMAI ”Fourth Museum” – a traveling educational adjunct to NMAI itself, its Cultural Resource Center in Suitland, Md., and its Heye Center in New York – is also in Gover’s thoughts, but more problematically so. ”There’s no lack of imagination on the Fourth Museum.” But money, as in funding, is a primary limitation. ”And it’s not in the budget now, I can tell you that.”
The budgeting process doesn’t concern him quite as much – budgeting within the Smithsonian Institution, NMAI’s parent organization, turns out to be more or less like budgeting within the Interior Department, familiar ground for the former assistant secretary for Indian affairs at the BIA. But the amount of money budgeted is another matter.
About that, Gover is emphatically concerned. He hopes for support from tribes. ”Let’s go forward together. … Anybody can have a pretty museum. … What do we do with it?”
Morale going forward isn’t a problem, Gover said, either on staff or in Indian country at large. The staff is talented, resourceful, and focused again after a year of transition from West’s long tenure. ”I haven’t encountered anyone yet who I’m not happy to be working with.”
As for Indian country at large, Gover said people have gotten past the ”kerfuffle” that broke out upon his appointment as executive director, with NMAI trustee Elouise Cobell, lead plaintiff in the Cobell v. Kempthorne lawsuit over federal mismanagement of the Individual Indian Money trust, arguing hard against him based on his engagement with the lawsuit while at the BIA. But Gover said he and Cobell share too many primary values to remain at odds for long, especially not with the museum’s future to consider. ”We’re going to work well together. She’s one of our committee chairs. I really want her experience on budget issues.”
Every budget item counts at NMAI these days, and federal budgets will be flat for years. ”It’s just the current dynamics in funding,” Gover said.
