The National Museum of the American Indian as Cultural Sovereignty

Abstract

On September 21, 2004, more than twenty-five thousand Native Americans gathered together on the Washington Mall to celebrate the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). As a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, I, too, participated in that moment, which was beautiful for so many reasons because of the physical beauty of the NMAI building and grounds, because of the cultural significance and even sacred connotation of so many objects in the museum, because of the more than sixty-five thousand nonNative Americans who joined the celebrations, and because the sun came out that morning after a solid week of rain. The thousands of people present that day seemed to understand that the National Museum of the American Indian is more than just a museum. As NMAI Director, W. Richard West (Southern Cheyenne) reflected, There was just this kind of power in the air for Native people. But somehow it was almost the same for non-Indians who were there. They sensed, lots of them, the sixty-five thousand who watched the procession, that there was something very fundamental going on that day.1 Even in 1989, when Congress passed Public Law 105-189 establishing a National Museum of the American Indian as part of the Smithsonian, those involved knew something fundamental was occurring. Introduced by Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawai'i and then Representative Ben Nighthorse Campbell (Northern Cheyenne) of Colorado, the bill significantly embodied the cultural resurgence that had been growing in Indian country for a number of years, a resurgence that took a more clearly limned shape and form and a stronger, more insistent voice in the public arena.2 consciousness recognized and acknowledged, in the words of poet Simon Ortiz (Acoma), that This America has been a burden of steel and mad death but also saw, in the