NMAI profile; GEORGE HORSE CAPTURE
The museum is not a place of storage, it's a place of education ... Our
venue is the world." George Horse Capture, curator and senior counselor to
the director at NMAI, decided to make himself more useful after the
occupation of Alcatraz Island 35 years ago, in which he took part. After
furthering his education at the University of Berkeley, he developed a
specialty in traditional tribal materials, first among his own people, the
A'aninin (Gros Ventre) in Montana, then among other tribes in the region.
"You have to learn traditional materials of those adjacent to you. It kind
of spirals out."
When, after 10 years at the Plains Indian Museum of the Buffalo Bill
Historical Center in Cody, Wyo., the spiral led him to NMAI, he "brought as
much Indianness as I could to help out ... I try to be close to the
community."
Typically he helps to select a theme for an exhibition, then talks with
tribal members about what elders and others have told them on the topic.
Their quotations are always included in the exhibition write-up, and the
NMAI collections are always brought up to date with the inclusion of
contemporary items. For a recent exhibition on Plains shirts, for instance,
Horse Capture selected from the NMAI collection of a couple hundred
historical shirts, but also gave space to two from the present, one a
basketball jersey and the other a ribbon shirt given by a community to
honor a recent doctoral graduate in education.
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There are not enough of those, he fears. Certainly he feels there are not
enough Indians in the museum field, even though gaps in tribal college
syllabi could be filled from NMAI collections. "They can come and study in
our collections ... The more we use these materials to tell our story, the
better our children will be ... It's not a county museum. It's the world.
We need people to come and help us."
Those who do come can expect a powerful experience. When materials emerge
the tribe may not have seen in decades or even a century, when photographs
begin to recall names and faces of old ... "Sometimes it's quite an
experience to see how they react."
