The Land Has Memory: Indigenous Knowledge, Native Landscapes, and the National Museum of the American Indian

Foreword

Foreword Like all mothers, Mother Earth is the ultimate giver. She reveals her beauty in countless variations, from wetlands and meadows to rain forests and deserts. Like any good mother, she does many things at the same time and does them all well. She nurtures us with food crops, heals us with medicinal plants, and sustains us with other natural resources. She teaches us how we should live our lives—don’t take more than you need, she chides. And like all parents, she shapes her children’s lives and their ways of looking at the world in profound ways. When we learn that one of our brothers or sisters—Native or not—is from Texas or Alaska or rural Brazil, we then know something about who that person is and how he or she sees the world. So, just as each generation makes its mark on the land, the land inevitably makes its mark on us. This is Indian thinking. There are many differences between traditional Native philosophies about the natural world and the Western paradigm that has dominated much of recent life in the Americas. Despite its ancient history, the American landscape has come to be seen, over the last several centuries, primarily as the object of Manifest Destiny and a mere backdropforAmericancivilization.Bothoftheseideasseembasedonthe assumption—completely at odds with Indian thinking—that the land is a passive commodity, a thing that gives only if we conquer it, a thing we can own and exploit to fullest advantage. More recently, though, a growing concern is being voiced about the state of our world. A global ecological movement is building that seeks to respect, honor, and preserve the xii foreword Creamware pot with raised corn design, ca. 1980. Made by Iris Y. Nampeyo (Hopi, b. 1944?), Arizona. 25/4763 health and beauty of our planet. These progressive ideas are in response to cutting-edge scientific research, but they reflect the ancient and deeply held Indian concept that the Earth herself is a living being, sentient and self-aware. Native and non-Native peoples have come to share a concern that our Mother is growing ill and that we must now tend to her with the care and love that she has always shown for us. Through performances, films, and lectures held at the Mall Museum and the George Gustav Heye Center, the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) has begun to address global warming and the environment, inaugurating our longterm commitment to participating in this crucial and complex dialogue. As a window into contemporary Native thinking about the land in general, and the Mall Museum landscape in particular, this book offers a wealth of insights. It also rights a number of misconceptions. Like many thingsaboutIndianpeoples,ourrelationshipswiththenaturalworldhave often been oversimplified and romanticized. While we certainly experience very deep connections to our homelands, the image of the innocent primitive frolicking in an unblemished landscape is truly at odds with the reality of countless generations of people who developed sophisticated land-management and agricultural techniques, from the controlled burnings of the North American prairies to ensure better grazing for the herds foreword xiii Navajo family harvesting crops, New Mexico, ca. 1952. P32981 of buffalo, to the careful way we harvest sassafras, to the interplanting of corn, beans, and squash. Any Hopi farmer will tell you that corn doesn’t just spring from the dry red earth of Arizona, even though it has grown there for thousands of years. It is the result of Native ingenuity, experimentation , and learning about how we should treat the Earth to best experience her bounty. The following essays work together to provide a most extraordinary map. They decode physical space, bringing to the printed page significant details that otherwise lie hidden in the water, trees, rocks, and plants sur- xiv foreword foreword xv opposite: NMAI’s northwest entrance and water feature. rounding NMAI’s Mall Museum. In a larger sense, they are also an atlas to the hearts and minds of a number of contemporary Native people as they construct and deconstruct ideas about their personal relationships to the physical world and to the lands that sustained their ancestors for generations before them. They offer an invitation to see the Mall Museum grounds through the distinctly Indian perspectives from which they were born. To view the landscape through Indian eyes can mean many...