National Museum Of The American Indian Research Articles

In Pursuit of the Ceremonial: The Laboratory of Anthropology's “Master Collection” of Zuni Pottery

In Pursuit of the Ceremonial: The Laboratory of Anthropology’s “Master Collection” of Zuni Pottery Karen Lucic and Bruce Bernstein This is the story of a curious episode in the early history of Santa Fe’s Laboratory of Anthropology (Lab) and its efforts to acquire a comprehensive collection of Zuni ceremonial pottery.1 The incident well illustrates the pitfalls that can result from ethnological traffic in sacred objects, as well as the multiple meanings that objects receive from their cultures of origin, which may be quite different from those assigned by scholars and museums. Institutional collecting ventures often disrupt and violate the Native communities where the material originated.2 At the same time, the purchasers of such specimens—sometimes blinded by an overwhelming desire to acquire rare items invested with Native American spirituality—are vulnerable to manipulation and deceit. Signs of ceremonialism can be manufactured, and what passes for tradition is often invented (fig. 1). We compare this heretofore unexamined incident—the acquisition of a “master collection” of Zuni pottery—to earlier examples of institutional collecting at Zuni pueblo and contextualize it in terms of relevant issues: the social consequences of the “salvage ethnology paradigm”; contested definitions of what constitutes a ceremonial object in Native American society; and the reasons why Euro-American institutions and individuals have been so irresistibly drawn to this kind of material. Drawing on extensive documentary evidence, we present a detailed narration of the episode—with all its idiosyncrasies, complications, and unsolved mysteries intact. We end by discussing what the pots themselves, and Karen Lucic is Professor of Art History at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York. Bruce Bernstein is the Executive Director of the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts, a non-profit that organizes the Santa Fe Indian Market; previously he was the assistant director for research and collections at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution. Journal of the Southwest 50, 1 (Spring 2008) : 1–102 2 ✜ Journal of the Southwest various Pueblo consultants, tell us about the collection’s history and significance. The buyers of the material include three men intimately involved with the fledgling Laboratory of Anthropology: Jesse Nusbaum, the institution ’s first director (R. Nusbaum 1980);3 Kenneth Chapman, the Lab’s first curator of anthropology and simultaneously curator of the Indian Arts Fund (fig. 2; Dauber 1993; Ellis 1968);4 and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (fig. 3), one of the world’s wealthiest philanthropists and principal financial backer of the Lab (Fosdick 1956; Stocking 1981, 1982). Rockefeller chiefly funded the Lab’s acquisition of what Nusbaum termed a “master collection” of Zuni sacred pottery. Others played important roles in assembling these objects. C. G. Wallace , a trader at Zuni (Slaney 1992, 1998; Tharp 1974), supplied the Lab with the bulk of this collection (fig. 4). Although he left school after the fifth grade, Wallace was a skillful entrepreneur who more than held his own against his highly educated and socially privileged clients. Zuni traders Charles Kelsey and W. S. Barnes sold additional items to the Lab. Finally, John Collier, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Commissioner of Indian Affairs (Collier 1963; Philp 1977; Kelly 1983), intervened in response to protests from Zuni, to try to prevent sacred objects from leaving the Figure 1. Zuni Olla Maidens at Gallup Inter-Tribal Ceremonial, ca. 1943. The Olla Maidens evoke a time when water was carried in earthen jars from source to home. In this view, three of the pots the women are balancing on their heads were probably made by the same person (as evidenced by the similarity of design). Two others use Acoma pots. (Courtesy of the Palace of the Governors [MNM/DCA], #90735) Figure 2. Kenneth Chapman on the banks of the Rio Grande, waiting for the train near San Ildefonso Pueblo, September 1929. (Courtesy of the Palace of the Governors [MNM/DCA], #28131) Figure 3. John D. Rockefeller Jr. in Santa Fe, 1927. Rockefeller visited Santa Fe several times to check on the progress of the Indian Arts Fund project and its new home, the Laboratory of Anthropology. He is in Sena Plaza where the temporary offices were located. (Courtesy of Archives of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture...

Surprise Gift Keeps on Giving After More Than 160 Years

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Information on Host CityFull AccessSurprise Gift Keeps on Giving After More Than 160 YearsJoan Arehart-TreichelJoan Arehart-TreichelSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:15 Feb 2008https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.43.4.0004You might call it “tit for tat.” During the War of 1812, the British burned the White House and other public buildings in Washington, D.C. But a few years later, the Americans got even in an unexpected way—British scientist James Smithson bequeathed money to the United States for the “increase and diffusion” of knowledge. So in 1846, the Smithsonian Institution was established in Washington, D.C.—not in Britain.In the 162 years since, the Smithsonian Institution has mushroomed into a collection of fabulous museums. Today they are among the marvels of the nation's capital and, most notably, are open to the public at no charge.The Hope Diamond and an enormous African bull elephant are among the treasures that can be found in the National Museum of Natural History. The diamond is supposedly cursed.Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian InstitutionIn the National Museum of Natural History, you can get up close and personal with ancient dinosaur bones and stuffed predators. A new exhibit—“Butterflies and Plants: Partners in Evolution”—showcases live butterflies and plants in an enclosed pavilion. A zoo of live insects can be found on the second floor. There, volunteers conduct tarantula-feeding demonstrations, work with live insects that visitors may touch and hold, and answer questions. A film in the museum's IMAX theater offers “Sea Monsters 3D: A Prehistoric Adventure.” It weaves together a story about an ancient and mysterious ocean world containing some of the most formidable creatures of all time.The National Air and Space Museum maintains the largest collection of historic air- and spacecraft in the world, making it the most popular Smithsonian museum. You can view the original Wright 1903 Flyer, Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, the Apollo 11 command module, and breathtaking IMAX films about flying. You can also touch a lunar rock, and you can visit the Albert Einstein Planetarium. It has been upgraded to include a Sky Vision dual digital projection system and six-channel digital surround sound, so that you'll be not only overwhelmed with spectacular images and spine-tingling sounds, but also actually feel as if you are zooming through the cosmos.The National Museum of the American Indian is new since the last APA annual meeting in Washington, D.C. (see Original article: 500 Years of Triumph, Tragedy in Focus at Newest Museum).And if that is not enough to walk your legs off, flood your senses, and stuff your brain with knowledge, you might also want to stop by some other Smithsonian museums, such as the Anacostia Community Museum, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Freer Gallery of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, National Museum of A frican Art, National Portrait Gallery, National Postal Museum, and the National Zoo.In the Anacostia Community Museum, you can experience a living-history presentation of Frederick Douglass, a noted 19th-century black social activist who lived in Washington, D.C. Or you can view an environmental video about restoring the Anacostia River and the depressed riverside communities fronting the river.In the National Postal Museum, you can see one of the world's largest collections of stamps, postal-history material that predates stamps, vehicles used to transport mailboxes and mailbags, and postal uniforms and equipment. ▪ ISSUES NewArchived

ACCESS FOR NATIVE PEOPLE AND THE PUBLIC: EXHIBITS AT THE SMITHSONIAN'S NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN

One of the duties of conservators at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) is to serve as conservation liaison to exhibit projects. The role of the conservation liaison is to ensure that preservation and conservation issues are considered throughout the exhibit development and production, and to ensure that the conservation treatment process incorporates the concerns of other museum staff and Native community members who are involved in the project. This paper uses a recent exhibit Listening to our Ancestors to illustrate how the conservation liaison ensures collaboration both with other NMAI staff and contractors and with Native people who work with the museum to produce exhibits and to involve conservation staff at all stages.

At.óow OR l s'aatí át?: Language revitalization, cultural creation, and the tlingit Macbeth

This essay considers a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, produced by Alaska’s Perseverance Theatre at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in March 2007, in which the construction of a new cultural product—a Macbeth translated into the social and linguistic setting of a pre-contact Tlingit society—was claimed as part of a process of language revitalization for the endangered Tlingit language. Perseverance’s Macbeth demonstrated that language recovery might be attainable through importing an iconic text from an hegemonic language and culture and claiming it for the threatened language. At the same time, Perseverance had to confront the possibility that their project could be viewed as a colonizing activity. This inquiry examines several translational tactics the production employed, with the goal of considering the project as one potential methodology for generating linguistic life for an endangered language and reversing language shift. In addition, the study considers how translational comparison at the cultural level demonstrates how the Tlingit Macbeth operated as a two-way force in cultural creation, informing the source as much as the target.

Museums and Mexican Indigenous Territoriality

Huichol Indians from western Mexico have contributed on various levels to exhibits about their culture, history and territoriality in Mexico's Museo Nacional de Antropología and the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC. The article compares these projects and their precursors since the 1930s in terms of changing modalities of institutional power, clientelism and indigenous agency. It also links this history to revalorizations of ethnic art and changing representations of culture and territory in legal claims. As Huichols engage new regional and global publics in these diverse contexts, they rework received images of sovereignty and the national space.

E Pluribus Oneidum

E Pluribus Oneidum Timothy J. Shannon (bio) Joseph T. Glatthaar and James Kirby Martin. Forgotten Allies: The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. 434 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00 (cloth); $16.00 (paper). During a recent trip to the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., I examined up close the sculpture Allies in War, Partners in Peace, a photograph of which serves as the frontispiece to this new history of the Oneidas' role in the American Revolution. The statue is an imposing work, nineteen and a half feet tall, featuring three human figures standing beneath a tree. At the center is the Oneida woman known as Polly Cooper, who according to oral tradition, accompanied forty-seven Oneida warriors who visited Valley Forge in the spring of 1778. The men had come to serve as auxiliaries to the patriot army, but Cooper had a more peaceful mission. She brought corn to the hungry Continentals and showed them how to prepare the Iroquoian dietary staple corn soup. The other two figures stand behind Cooper. On her right, George Washington holds a wampum belt. On her left, the Oneida chief and patriot ally Skenandoah holds a peace pipe. Each human figure is complemented by an animal associated with Iroquoian clan totems. Cooper stands above a turtle. A bear sticks its head out between Washington and Cooper, and a wolf does the same between Cooper and Skenandoah. Cooper, her hair dressed in long twin braids and topped with an odd-looking headband, seems to have walked off a box of Land O Lakes® butter. One of her hands is open and extended downward in a gesture of invitation; the other clutches a hefty, overflowing basket of corn. The Indian-maiden-as-earth-mother motif is accentuated by her starry-eyed gaze, her animal attendants, and the tree that towers above her. Washington and Skenandoah strike more masculine but also contrasting poses. Skenandoah stands tall but relaxed, his eyes fixed with gentle confidence directly ahead, the hint of a smile crossing his face. Washington is stiff as a board and frowning. His empty eyes stare off in the same direction as Polly Cooper's, but he does not seem nearly as pleased with what he sees. While no doubt intended to inspire and enlighten, this sculpture left me feeling a bit queasy. The braids, corn, and animals all smacked of contemporary [End Page 344] Native American kitsch, and the message seemed to be yet another iteration of the Squanto and Pocahontas stories: selfless Native Americans rescue imperiled colonizers, so that said colonizers can survive to cheat and murder them at a later date. That is certainly one way to tell the story of the Oneida nation during the American Revolution. They fought on the side of the patriots (unlike most of their Iroquois brethren), and were repaid with dispossession and dispersal in the years that followed. The Polly Cooper story, however, renders the Oneidas' complex motives for allying with the patriots into a tart morality play. As in so many similar tales from American history, it pits generous and innocent Indians against villainous Europeans. No wonder George Washington has such a grim look on his face. He has seen this movie before and he knows how its ends. Even worse, this time he is playing the heavy. Allies in War, Partners in Peace provides a fitting visual cue for the theme that drives this book. Joseph T. Glatthaar and James Kirby Martin, two distinguished military historians, have decided that "rather than trying to embellish the harsh realities" of the Oneidas' Revolutionary experience "with some sort of artificial theoretical analysis," they would instead commit themselves "to preparing a swift-moving narrative" (p. 405). Their title, Forgotten Allies, provides all the theory they need. There are two ways to justify the claim that the Oneidas' alliance with the patriots was forgotten. First, the authors could prove that in the aftermath of the Revolution, the victorious Americans conveniently "forgot" that the Oneidas had allied with them, so that they could dispossess them with a clear conscience. Second, the authors could blame the historical profession for...

Absorbing or Obscuring the Absence of a Critical Space in the Americas for Indigeneity: The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian

Absorbing or Obscuring the Absence of a Critical Space in the Americas for Indigeneity: The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian

CIRCULATION, ACCUMULATION, AND THE POWER OF SHUAR SHRUNKEN HEADS

In this article, I discuss the changing meanings of tsantsas, the shrunken heads of enemies slain in war, for Shuar, a group indigenous to the Ecuadorian Amazon. By the time Ecuadorian authorities put an end to warfare in the 1950s, Shuar had exchanged all of their tsantsas with European and Euro-American collectors in return for trade goods. I focus on the continuing significance for Shuar of tsantsas, despite their absence, and the impact of the repatriation in 1995 of several heads by the National Museum of the American Indian. I suggest that, prior to colonization and missionization, Shuar headhunting was part of a larger system characterized by the circulation of powers that took multiple and changing forms. I further argue that as shrunken heads themselves began to circulate until they came to rest in Western collections and museums, their meaning was subordinated to a system in which power rests on the accumulation of values. After their long sojourn abroad, the heads now represent distance: the distance of contemporary Shuar from their past, and the distance between Shuar leaders and their constituents. The circulation of tsantsas over the past hundred years thus reveals transnational dimensions of power while simultaneously confounding simple distinctions between savagery and civilization.

Beautiful Beyond: Christian Songs in Native Languages (review)

Reviewed by: Beautiful Beyond: Christian Songs in Native Languages Elaine Keillor Beautiful Beyond: Christian Songs in Native Languages, 2004. Produced by Howard Bass and presented by the National Museum of the American Indian. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, CD (1), SFW CD 40480. This interesting recorded document was organized to coincide with the opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. It contains thirty-three tracks of music connected with Christianity and sung in fifteen different languages: Cherokee, Choctaw, Comanche, Creek, Hawaiian, Hopi, Kiowa, Mohawk, Navajo, Oneida, Ojibwe, Seminole, Sioux, Tewa (Tano), and Yup'ik. The three opening essays in the booklet—written by Richard West Jr., Gerald L. Hill, and Edward Wapp Wahpeconiah—stress how the adoption of Christianity played a role in the retention of Native languages through missionary translations of scripture and hymn texts. While West presents his experience with the Baptist religion while growing up in his Cheyenne home, Hill and Wahpeconiah stress the range of styles to be encountered, a diversity that resulted from the varied forms of Christianity introduced by missionaries. Because of the variety of religious influences experienced by indigenous cultures, the tracks have been chosen to give a sampling of different musical styles resulting from the encounter between Christianity and Native traditions over the past four hundred years. The first six tracks have many similarities with standard powwow songs—that is, a call-and-response structure usually repeated four times with a wide, descending melodic contour. Basically monophonic (with only a single pitch heard at one time), these renditions sometimes have a doubling of the pitch at the octave above, either by women's voices or male voices in the response sections. Another track that is reflective of a particular native tradition is "Ke Aloha O Ka Haka," a hymn written by the deposed Hawaiian Queen Lili'uokalani on March 22, 1895. The short portion of the Tewa Mass included on this compilation does not seem to be an adaptation of a Franciscan mass setting, unlike late-seventeenth-century Abenaki-language versions found on Chant de la Jerusalem des terres froides: Québec—Montréal Indiens Abenakis (K617, 1995). Unfortunately, the notes give no indication of the origin of the Tewa Mass, but the monophonic vocal melodic line has an accompaniment of electronic piano, drum, and rattles. Christian missions spread the practice of part singing, or singing in harmony, among indigenous groups in North America. For example, two-part singing was introduced to the Abenaki in 1685. By 1699, written reports by French visitors and settlers refer to how beautifully both men's and women's choirs sang in three or even four parts. Some reports even state that Abenaki church singing was better than that heard in France. Most of the remaining tracks of Beautiful Beyond illustrate various forms of two-, three-, or four-part singing introduced by missionaries. Among the most intriguing examples are those sung in Yup'ik based on liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church. These consist of unaccompanied recitation in four parts, with the pitches usually changing only near the end of a textual line. Another interesting unaccompanied vocal presentation is that of the Cherokee. These examples show evidence of "southern harmony," a form of church singing that survived in the southeastern United States through camp meetings in the nineteenth century and through publications such as Southern Harmony, whose first edition appeared in 1835 in South Carolina. In southern harmony style, the unaccompanied singers split into three or four parts, with the melody sung by the tenor voices. Often, one part of the choir will make a response, while the remainder sustains a three- or four-note chord. Portions sung by a soloist make this style somewhat more reminiscent of the Native-modeled [End Page 356] renditions discussed at the beginning of this review. Unfortunately, the liner notes often do not give details about the instrumental accompaniments that are occasionally used. These instruments vary from what seems to be an autoharp in track 16, an Oneida version of "Rock of Ages," to organ, guitar, or piano on other tracks. Does Walter Calhoun accompany himself on the banjo for "Guide Me, Jehovah" on track 27? No texts...

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Aspects of Early Native American History Cluster

Few aspects of American history have gone through as rapid a transformation as Native American history during the past generation. In the not too distant past scholars, including many anthropologists, wrote accounts of particular Indian ‘tribes’. Many of these works, which were often quite sympathetic to their subject, concentrated on politics and wars. Beginning in the late 1960s, historians, anthropologists, and those calling themselves ‘ethnohistorians’ began to bring new perspectives to the subject. To date, many of the most important studies focus on the period before 1850. Taken together, these works testify to the fundamental importance of understanding the histories of indigenous peoples in the Americas. In recent years, scholarship about Native Americans has boomed. The cluster of six articles here suggests the range of work being done in the field. Nicholas Rosenthal provides an overview of some of the major developments and Joshua Piker offers a penetrating view of the concept of race and how it has shaped our understanding of Native peoples in early America. Ruth Spack’s short essay on American Indian schooling reveals a shift in the history of education based on the incorporation of indigenous perspectives. Tyler Boulware investigates the notion of national identity and its application for Native peoples. Dixie Ray Haggard’s perceptive piece offers nothing less than a major revision of scholars’ understanding of the Yamasee War of the 1710s, an event that played a pivotal role in the southeast during the eighteenth century. Finally, Steven Hackel and Anne Reid reveal the benefits of electronic publication. Their essay on the Early California Population Project provides insight into a major database housed at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, a project now available to scholars that will revolutionize our understanding the period from the 1760s to the midnineteenth century. The full cluster is made up of the following articles:

Museums and the Utility of Culture: The Politics of Liberal Democracy and Cultural Well-Being

Contemporary museums exist as variously configured sets of institutional coordinates that aspire to function as popular, demotic spaces dedicated to representing a variety of experiences and modes of citizenship. In some cases, they can be seen as gesturing toward Yúdice's formulation, whereby recognizing the value of culture as a resource may facilitate or enable a new episteme that is ‘posthegemonic’ (from the ‘purview of the national proscenium’) and predicated on the withdrawal of the state from the public sphere (which also redefines the parameters of social agency). This post-Habermasian take on publicity has real implications for museums, which are, by and large, still functioning within what is, according to Yúdice, an exhausted model of citizenship. This paper examines whether, in aiming to provide a much-publicized social advocacy role for indigenous peoples and source communities, the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa might be seen as producing open and inclusive public spaces that encourage debate about what constitutes citizenship in postcolonial multicultural societies. I argue that a neo-Habermasian realm of association and interaction may be provided by cultural centre-like museums. However, I qualify this point by adding that this suitability also reveals the double-edged role of culture at the NMAI and Te Papa—where it is unclear whether culture provides a key resource for the state's social management discourses, or whether it is connected to discourses of development produced by—or in consultation with—communities.

The Art of Native Life: Exhibiting Culture and Identity at the National Museum of the American Indian

Within its short history as an institution and as a site of multilayered display and examination, the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) has presented critical opportunities for the consideration of Native American art and material culture. Because NMAI is located at an important intersection between its audience of Native and non-Native individuals; its responsibility to Native communities and Native history; and its place within the Smithsonian Institution, it must strive toward complex, multifaceted goals and acknowledge Native and non-Native interests. To demonstrate these complexities, I examine one of NMAI’s recent exhibit projects, Listening to Our Ancestors: The Art of Native Life along the North Pacific Coast, in an effort to tease out the aesthetic and cultural composition of Native objects as perceived and promoted by Native and non-Native museum staff and Native community consultants. I review the operating philosophy and mission of NMAI and follow with a discussion of the object selection and presentation involved in Listening to Our Ancestors, an exhibit of which I was a museumbased cocurator and on which I have an intimate working perspective. I aim to add to our understanding of the different approaches to visualizing and displaying culture through this firsthand account of exhibit development and display at NMAI.

Eugenics as Indian Removal: Sociohistorical Processes and the De(con)struction of American Indians in the Southeast

Although research on the history of the eugenics movement in the United States is legion, its impact on state policies that identified and defined American Indians has yet to be fully addressed. The exhibit, Our Lives: Comtemporary Life and Identities (ongoing until September 21, 2014) at the National Museum of the American Indian provides a provocative vehicle for examining how eugenics-informed public policy during the first quarter of the twentieth century served to "remove" from official records Native peoples throughout the Southeast. One century after Indian Removal of the antebellum era, Native peoples in the American Southeast provide an important but often overlooked example of how racial policies, this time rooted in eugenics, effected a documentary erasure of Native peoples and communities.

George Gustav Heye and the National Museum of the American Indian - Collecting the Collector

On September 21, 2004 the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) opened its doors to the public. This essay will look at the institution's history, especially its collector, George Gustav Heye, and his representation inside the museum walls. Oscillating between honored patron and greedy businessman, the labels and objects explore his personality but conceal his relationship to the cultures he collected that remained extraordinarily superficial. The problem will be illustrated by using museum labels to explore their implicit rhetoric.

Small Spirits: Native American Dolls from the National Museum of the American Indian

Small Spirits: Native American Dolls from the National Museum of the American Indian. Mary Jane Lenz. Washington, DC: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 2004. 176 pp. (Co‐published with the University of Washington Press.)

The Visual Grammar of Suffering: Pia Lindman and the Performance of Grief

Pia Lindman is perhaps best known for her Public Sauna at P.S.1 in 2000, where she installed a working sauna in an artspace and invited the audience to join in the performance, defying the taboo of nudity in American culture and foregrounding the centrality of the human body in art. Like Public Sauna, her more recent work belongs in the tradition of minimalist and community-oriented art. Site-specific in nature, it concerns the relation of the body to public space in everyday life and the broader socio-political issues inscribed in those dynamics. Lindman provokes us to think about how everyday interactions with bodies, architecture, media, and public art affect our sense of self and our experience of social space. By drawing attention to how social interactions are themselves performative, her work also reveals the inherent performativity of making and experiencing art. Her recent New York Times demonstrates the tensions between human gestures of private suffering and the political motivations for monumentalizing personal grief. Lindman has performed New York Times in Mexico City, Tokyo, Helsinki, Vienna, Berlin, and most recently at Battery Park, the Vera List Center, and the Luxe Gallery in New York. The actual performance is the last step in a long and complex process of tracing out the mechanics of making and publicizing gestures of grief. Lindman begins by videotaping herself re-enacting some of the 600 photographs of Afghan, American, Iraqi, Sudanese, Palestinian, Israeli, Balinese bodies in pain collected from The New York Times from September 2002 to September 2003. She then sketches out her re-enactments (with particular attention to facial expressions and hand gestures) and shares this set of drawings with the audience at the beginning of each public performance. The drawings outline the bodily gestures of griev ing captured in the photographs, but are devoid of any feature that would indicate where the image comes from, or whom it depicts. By exhibiting her own sketches of her own re-enactments of the images of grief from The New York Times rather than those images themselves, Lindman demonstrates that gestures are not forms of pure expression but interpretations meant to frame information. On one occasion, Lindman begins her New York Times performance dressed in gray and carrying a gray flag to lead a group of spectators through Battery Park, stopping first in front of the National Museum of the American Indian. At the foot of the

Indigenous Media Gone Global: Strengthening Indigenous Identity On‐ and Offscreen at the First Nations/First Features Film Showcase

For 12 days in May 2005, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), as well as several other screening venues in Washington, D.C., hosted a group of renowned indigenous filmmakers from around the globe for the groundbreaking film showcase, “First Nations/First Features: A Showcase of World Indigenous Film and Media.” This film showcase highlighted the innovative ways in which indigenous filmmakers draw on indigenous storytelling practices to create cinematic visions that honor their long‐standing indigenous cultural worlds while reaching local and world audiences. In this essay, I highlight the onscreen impact through an analysis of several films featured in First Nations/First Features, as well as the offscreen impact emphasizing how the indigenous directors used this opportunity to strengthen social networks and share experience in this industry, which may develop into future collaborative film projects.

Guest Editor's Remarks

Guest Editor's RemarksCritical Engagements with the NMAI Amy Lonetree (bio) On September 21, 2004, the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) opened on the National Mall in Washington DC to great fanfare and publicity. Indigenous peoples from throughout the hemisphere came together to celebrate the opening of an institution more than fifteen years in the making. According to one estimate more than eighty thousand people came to the opening ceremonies. The enthusiasm in the air, during both the opening ceremonies and the six-day First American Festival that followed, was palpable. I can honestly say that I have never seen so many Native people in one place. For more than a week we made our presence known in Washington DC. Everywhere you went—walking on the streets, in restaurants, at your hotel, at the museums, at the historical monuments throughout the city—Native people were there. It was a time to celebrate, to honor both the Indigenous past and present, to spend time with family, and to get reacquainted with old friends and make new ones. During the time of the initial celebration and since, the museum has generated a great deal of attention, and many voices have weighed in on its significance. Whereas the building, its landscaping, and its restaurant have overwhelmingly been viewed as a great success, less uniform have been the views of what is inside the museum walls. The inaugural exhibitions received a range of responses from the media, the larger American Indian community, museum professionals, the general public, and scholars. Many of the reviews of the museum have been glowing, others ambivalent, and many have been downright scathing. These varied responses to NMAI's new museological approach is recognition that [End Page 507] however one may view this new institution it is certainly a site that has created and continues to create a great deal of reflection and critique. This special edition of the American Indian Quarterly is devoted to a critical engagement with the NMAI. The writers whose work is featured were invited to offer their insights on the significance of the museum from their own disciplinary and personal perspectives. The scholars in this issue come from a range of disciplines: Native American studies, anthropology, archaeology, museum studies, history, and art history. The writings cover a range of topics, including tracing the NMAI's genealogy, exploring its significance to the changing historical relationship between Indigenous peoples and museums, reflecting on the museum's hemispheric approach, and critically examining and reviewing specific galleries and their impact. We begin with an essay by anthropologist and museum studies scholar Ira Jacknis, "A New Thing? The National Museum of the American Indian in Historical and Institutional Perspective." This essay provides extensive information on NMAI's long history and how the museum's story begins with the large-scale collecting practices of George Gustav Heye in the early part of the twentieth century. Eventually his collection would total eight hundred thousand pieces from Native peoples from throughout the hemisphere. Jacknis follows the evolution of the museum under Heye until his death in 1956, the period of crisis after Heye's death, and its eventual transfer to the Smithsonian, where it became the National Museum of the American Indian. As well-known art historian and museum studies scholar Ruth Phillips has argued, "Museum exhibitions, like museums themselves, have genealogies—family trees the tracing of which allows us to place contemporary projects in critically important perspective," and the context Jacknis provides on the museum is critical in understanding its current formation.1 Art historian Mario A. Caro argues that the site-specificity of the NMAI—located in the nation's capital on the National Mall—greatly influences visitors' experiences. His essay, "You Are Here: The NMAI as Site of Identification," deals with the significance of site to a visitor's engagement with museums, noting that "it is essential to consider the site specificity of museums in general in order to complicate the workings of the narratives produced inside." His essay provides context on what visitors brings with them to the museum and how the nation's capital works in framing the presentation of Native cultures. [End...

Change Over Time: The National Museum of the American Indian

Consisting of curves and nonlinear in conception, the five-story National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) symbolizes nature in the urban environment of Pantheon-like buildings that dominate Washington, D.C. An impressive sight, NMAI is where East meets West on the Atlantic seaboard. It reflects the history of indigenous peoples of this hemisphere, extending new cultural knowledge to foreign visitors from all parts of the world and to all non-indigenous wanting to learn about Native peoples. NMAI was designed to show how and why Native peoples hold nature to be integral to their lives and cultures. Seemingly out of place, NMAI is actually the only structure on the Smithsonian Mall that is in its natural element of the indigenous. In its distinct architectural form, resembling an off-white mesa indigenous to the Southwest, this abstract and mountain-like structure challenges visitors to entertain a different perspective, the perspective of the other side of Indian-white contact that began over five hundred years ago. NMAI is a political and cultural statement of conflict resolution allowing people to learn from native ideas, beliefs, and worldview. Ironically, NMAI occupies the last site on the Smithsonian Mall to celebrate the first Americans of this continent. NMAI has sixty thousand members, more than any other individual Smithsonian museum. The large and

Heritage vs. History at the National Museum of the American Indian

Review Article| January 01 2006 Heritage vs. History at the National Museum of the American Indian STEVEN CONN STEVEN CONN STEVEN CONN is the author of Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926 and History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century both from the University of Chicago Press. He directs the Public History Program at Ohio State University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2006) 28 (2): 69–74. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2006.28.2.69 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation STEVEN CONN; Heritage vs. History at the National Museum of the American Indian. The Public Historian 1 January 2006; 28 (2): 69–74. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2006.28.2.69 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2006 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.