A Different Sort of (P)Reservation: Some Thoughts on the National Museum of the American Indian

Abstract

In the past decade, for variety of reasons—e.g., the gains of feminism and the civil rights movement, the profusion of mass media, growing awareness of non-Western/non-European cultures, the increasing commodification of cultural production, and the emergence of postmodern theory, to name few—the museum has become increasingly contested terrain, and its practices the subject of voluminous critique. What is the role of the museum in contemporary society? What is exhibited and what is excluded? Who is to interpret the material and to what end? Responses to such questions, including the reinstallation of permanent collections, temporary exhibitions, academic treatises, institutional directives, and even children's book, Make Your Own Museum, have proliferated in recent years, typically with the intent to subvert traditional museum practice by challenging narratives, modes of display, and strategies of representation. The new National Museum of the American Indian in New York City is one institution that has worked to subvert the museum status quo, but whether it stands as model for future institutions or as an object lesson in the dangers of trying to be all things to all people is debatable. In this essay, I will address critically the efforts of the NMAI, with the intent of placing it within the larger cultural discourse on museums and the representation of cultures and their objects. The museum has historically validated the values and beliefs of the powerful majority, while at the same time justifying its own existence through rhetoric of social benevolence and equality. It has been struggling to define itself and its audience for centuries. A creation of the modern world, the museum was ill equipped to represent various collective cultures and identities. The pervasive disenchantment with modernity and its institutions in recent decades, has forced the museum to reconsider its purpose and practices. With the recognition that culture is an historical construct comes the realization that our representations of it are incomplete. As James Clifford has written, culture is neither an object to be described nor definitively interpreted but is instead contested, temporal, emergent (1986:18-9). Implicated in this emergence is representation and explanation—both by insiders and outsiders. This discovery has had serious implications for the museum. Inherently resistant to alteration, the goal of the museum has always been definitive—not provisional or variable—interpretation and explanation. By removing objects from their original contexts and making them stand for abstract wholes, museum collections create the illusion of an adequate representation of the world. Modes of display override specific histories of production and appropriation. Systems of ordering and classification promote and validate notions of progress, universality, and objective truth. The advancement of binary frame of reference, typical of Western thought, serves to undermine external realities of diversity—high/low, us/them, black/white. As Douglas Crimp has written the history of museology is a history of the various attempts to deny the heterogeneity of the museum, to reduce it to homogeneous system or series (1983:49). But the traditional museological practices outlined above are no longer tenable and institutions