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

Honoring Our Hosts

HoNORING OUR HoSTS Duane Blue Spruce For Native people, the process of creating something—a meal, a basket, an article of clothing, a dance, a song—is as important as that which is being created. Pueblo people demonstrate this belief in their daily lives, whether they are making loaves of oven bread or hand-coiled clay pots. To make ceremonial or everyday pots and bowls, for example, Pueblo women work together on the arduous task of gathering clay from riverbeds and wooded areas and watch their elders to learn which plants to collect for the pigment. They sing songs taught to them by their families, giving thanks for the bounty and honoring the removal of earth and plant life from the ground. Each task is equally important and must be undertaken in the right frame of mind since negative thoughts could destroy a pot while it is being fired. Likewise, in envisioning and developing the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., as a truly Native place, everyone who participated treated each step in the process as a significant creative act in itself, guided by a collaborative spirit and following Native protocol throughout the planning and implementation of the project. Paradoxically, one of the first steps in creating the museum’s lush landscape took place during four days of bitter cold in January 1995, when the museum site was frozen and covered in snow. A vision session had been organized with about two dozen elders, leaders, educators, and artists 12 duane blue spruce Laguna Pueblo painted olla (jar), New Mexico, ca. 1900. 21/7044 fromNativecommunitiesthroughoutNorth,Central,andSouthAmerica who had been invited to meet with representatives from the Smithsonian, NMAI, and the building’s architectural design team. This session was to builduponthedetailedarchitecturalprogramoutlinedin“TheWayofthe People,” a document summarizing numerous consultations with Native people and museum professionals undertaken in the early 1990s. Project architect Douglas Cardinal (Blackfoot) and the design team felt that one goal of the vision session was to establish, from the beginning, a decisionmaking process based on collaboration and community input—to engage dialogue that relied upon many voices. We had set aside four days for the group to discuss the desired attributes of a national Native museum, knowing that the conversation would lead in many directions and offer a multitude of ideas rather than a single, overall concept. While the design team attempted to guide the dialogue, the most important task for all participants was to listen respectfully to each speaker. In addition to preopposite : East-facing main entrance of NMAI. 14 duane blue spruce senting their personal histories, the participants related stories from their communities that spoke to who they were and their place in the world. One of these participants was William Tallbull, a Cheyenne elder and cultural preservationist for the Northern Cheyenne. Like other elders, Tallbull had a tremendous amount of traditional plant knowledge. The eloquence and power of his words resonated with the team and solidified the integral importance of plants and the landscape to the museum’s overall philosophy and design. He echoed the sentiments expressed by Native consultants in “The Way of the People,” including Santa Clara Pueblo architect and educator Rina Swentzell. She presents her thoughts on the natural world, in part, in the document’s preamble: “We embrace the cycles of our organic world, such as days, seasons—and our lives. Our life and death cycles connect us to the cycles of the sky, water, and earth. We honor these cycles in our daily tasks, our subsistence patterns, and ceremonial activities. Our sense of time is in accord with a natural continuum where past, present, and future are interrelated.” Key concepts began to emerge from the vision session, which built upon years of consultations and laid the foundation for the building’s landscape design. Four Native advisers who worked with the project team throughout 1995 thoughtfully considered all of the concepts: Arthur Amiotte (Oglala Lakota), Susie Bevins (Inupiat), Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee), and Alma Snell (Crow). This Native Advisory Group served as the project’s cultural advisers, making sure the design remained true to the concepts put forth. They infused the project with a distinctively Native viewpoint by maintaining a collaborative spirit and addressing the myriad design suggestions with an eye toward cultural authenticity. Most important, the landscape would honor the host tribes on whose land the museum was being built by introducing indigenous plants and...