The National Museum of the American Indian? Elizabeth Archuleta

7KH1DWLRQDO0XVHXPRIWKH$PHULFDQ,QGLDQ $P\/RQHWUHH$PDQGD-&REE*UHHWKDP 3XEOLVKHGE\8QLYHUVLW\RI1HEUDVND3UHVV $P\/RQHWUHHDQG$PDQGD-&REE*UHHWKDP 7KH1DWLRQDO0XVHXPRIWKH$PHULFDQ,QGLDQ&ULWLFDO&RQYHUVDWLRQV /LQFROQ8QLYHUVLW\RI1HEUDVND3UHVV 3URMHFW086( :HE'HFKWWSPXVHMKXHGX For additional information about this book http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780803219373 Access provided by New York University (11 Jan 2016 18:08 GMT) 7. Gym Shoes, Maps, and Passports, Oh My! Creating Community or Creating Chaos at the National Museum of the American Indian? Elizabeth Archuleta For those of you accustomed to a structure that moves from point A to point B to point C, this presentation may be somewhat difficult to follow because the structure of Pueblo expression resembles something like a spider’s web — with many little threads radiating from a center, criss-crossing each other. As with the web, the structure will emerge as it is made and you must simply listen and trust, as the Pueblo people do, that meaning will be made. — Leslie Marmon Silko To better understand a perspective or worldview that is different from ours, we should step outside of our lives and enter the lives of people or groups who are different from us. Literature allows us to do this, because writers create for their readers worlds within texts. Yet literature is not completely imaginative. Writers are born into families and communi- ties with whom they have interacted and from whom they have learned about the world, meaning that writers’ works express opinions, beliefs, and values that can reflect worldviews and experiences different from ours. American Indian literature is popular for what it can teach mainstream Americans about groups of people often little known to them, and like literature, museums are places where mainstream Americans have learned about American Indians. In fact, museums resemble literature in many ways. First, museum displays are texts that allow us to “read” about different groups, such as the Indigenous peoples represent- archuleta ed in the National Museum of the American Indian (nmai). Second, like literature, museums have often perpetuated American Indian imagery and stereotypes that justify American Indians’ disadvantages. Museums have also perpetuated histories that ignore the violence of conquest and that have converted theft and violence into a heroic narrative of strug- gle to tame the wilderness.1 Like literature, the nmai displays have the potential to touch something in us and give us something with which to connect, which is why we can “read,” analyze, and interpret responses to the museum as well as its exhibits and displays using the tools of rhetor- ical and literary analysis. As with a work of literature, we can question, interpret, and challenge the meaning of museum displays, because they present imaginative worlds “written” both visually and textually within a particular time and place, recording curators’ opinions, beliefs, and values. Finally, literature as well as museums such as the nmai, dedicated to the voices and memories of subjugated or marginalized groups and their experiences offer perspectives and versions of history that vary from the dominant culture. Indigenous peoples’ memories and oral histories in the nmai displays are records of events that challenge dominant history by disputing or contesting the official version of events. Because the nmai, like American Indian literature, challenges official history, it represents a social, historical, and political world outside the “text.” It creates arguments about the world in which Indigenous peoples have lived and continue to live. Just as authors do, nmai museum curators make claims about the “truth” of the world, and their claims are based on personal experiences, including encounters with families, community leaders, and government authorities. American Indian authors and nmai curators form connections between the texts they “write,” the world around them, and external conditions. Because nmai narra- tives contain stories mostly unfamiliar to mainstream Americans, the stories they do tell teach us about American Indians’ subjugated knowledge. The dominant culture has suppressed American Indians’ knowledge because it often questions and challenges the legitimacy of the United 182 gym shoes, maps, and passports, oh my! States, but it typically does so in ways that are hard to detect, especially if one is unused to “reading” or hearing the voices of American Indians. Because all texts are open to various interpretations, one needs to con- struct meaning even if one is “reading” American Indians or museum displays, and this essay begins by analyzing non-Indian interpretations of American Indians as well as the nmai. Several strategies exist for dis- qualifying subjugated knowledge, and I highlight some of these strategies that are evident in newspaper reports and two museum reviews about the First Americans Festival and the museum’s grand opening. I end by offering another interpretation by an Indigenous scholar, myself, who found very different meanings in the nmai as “text” through a reading of several items: beaded sneakers, information on a Kuna Yala mapping project, the Yakama Nation’s Land Enterprise and Closed Area, Central America’s Indigenous peoples, and a Haudenosaunee passport. A Non-Indian “Reading” of American Indians One strategy the dominant culture has used to disqualify Indigenous knowledge is to question the authenticity of the community that remembers. The use of this strategy becomes evident in reports about Indigenous peoples attending a celebration that accompanied the nmai’s grand opening. For the September 2004 First Americans Festival, Washington Post journalists attempted to convey what they observed when thousands of Indigenous peoples converged on the Mall of the nation’s capital to cel- ebrate the museum’s grand opening. Newspaper articles on the First Americans Festival tended to be positive, undoubtedly because “real” Indians in bright colors, beads, buckskin, and feathers delighted report- ers.2 Nevertheless, journalists mulled over items seemingly out of place. For instance, Hank Stuever expressed his surprise at seeing an Indian in full regalia with a cell phone, describing the image as “almost anachronis- tic.”3 The image amused Stuever, a response he rationalized by referring to his preconceived, stereotypical notions about Indians: “A non-Indian couldn’t be blamed for delighting in the banal details that make today’s 183 archuleta Indians seem less mythological and quite real.” Stuever’s response illus- trates the distinctive associations non-Indians have attached to “Indians,” transforming them into unreal mythological objects whose lives have remained static and untainted by the modern world and technology. Indian families pushing high-end strollers, drinking Pepsi, and not appearing “classically Indian” entertained a reporter who had expected to experi- ence cultural difference in romantic and mythological terms. When he experienced something vastly different from this, he appeared to question whether Indians carrying cell phones or pushing strollers were real- ly “authentic” Indians. Washington Post Reviews of the nmai While coverage of the First Americans Festival tended to be congenial, two Washington Post reviews on the museum, which opened in conjunc- tion with the festival, were more hostile and angry. An analysis of the discourse both reviews contain highlights beliefs that unite them across an ideological spectrum and allows us to better understand the reviewers’ choice of words as they describe what they see and how they depict Indians and the museum. Deconstructing their language hints at the general public’s expectation of national museums, which the reviewers imply should be (a) repositories for objects that experts have identified as culturally significant and displayed in an unbiased manner, (b) visu- al representations of other cultures with labels and factual information that allow objects to “speak for themselves,” or (c) exhibits that educate the public through “scientifically” accurate displays constructed by art historians or anthropologists. Their language also points to the public’s expectation of Indigenous peoples. Analyzing the reviewers’ language tells us more about non-Indians and why many tend to more eas- ily accept mythological and less real images and interpretations that are familiar, easy to understand, and, most of all, noncontroversial than they do real Indians. As a marketplace of ideas and public discourse, the nmai became, for two reviewers, a “symbolic battleground for under- 184 gym shoes, maps, and passports, oh my! lying questions of community, citizenship, and identity . defined by entrenched ‘us-versus-them’ positions.”4 In addition to strategies that disqualify Indigenous knowledge by ques- tioning the authenticity of the community that remembers, other strategies include dismissing memories that appear tainted by politics and undercutting the legitimacy of its knowledge claims. Chon Noriega argues that “minority” issues remain marginalized rather than perceived “as an integral part of national categories and debates,” making Indigenous peoples’ concerns and problems appear “as an unsettling set of outside demands.” A majority of the dominant culture wants national museums to be homogeneous and noncontroversial entities rather than places where various groups might use space differently, cater to different audiences, or exhibit alternative aesthetic positions.5 Noriega

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