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f 179 f Epilogue In the mid-1990s, a delegation of rabbis visited Arizona for a“spiritual gathering” with Navajos.1 Photographer Frédéric Brenner’s image of this meeting appears in his photography collection titled Diaspora: Homelands in Exile. Brenner’s photograph was taken from a car window. On the left, a group of Jewish men (with some women) gather by the side of the desert road. They are wrapped in prayer shawls, carrying a Torah. On the right, seen only in the car’s rearview mirror, stand the group of Navajos. As writer Tvsi Blanchard comments of the photograph: “The Jews are looking at the Navajos who are looking at the Jews while we, the viewers, are looking at a photo of the Jews and a mirror image of the Navajos” (2:101).2 According to Jacques Derrida, who joins several others in writing about both the gathering and its image, the event was the idea of a rabbi from Oregon: “Would this idea have occurred to a rabbi from another country?” he asks (2:101). One participant, Rabbi Yitzhak Husbands-Hankin, writes of the gathering: I have long sensed a profound weave of connection between Native Americans and the Jewish people. Ancient Hebrew tribes deemed their land sacred. Driven into exile, we, their descendants, never abandoned the idea of returning home. . . . Unlike the exile that carried us far from home, the suffering that Native Americans bear was brought upon them by travelers from other nations who came into their ancestral home with genocidal force. (2:100) 180 f epilogue Husbands-Hankin continues,“We saw each other in the mirror of time, and recognized our bond with one another, with creation, and with the Creator of all humanity” (2:100). Here, in a telling example of the negotiations between tribalism and universalism that characterize Jewish engagement with Indians, Husbands-Hankin invokes “humanity” in the service of his own tribal ethos. And just as the Navajos are only glimpsed as reflections in the photograph, their voices are also absent in the recollection of the event, as other (Jewish) voices debate Jewish-Native likeness or unlikeness and the gathering’s utility or inutility.3 In a similar fashion, I am painfully aware of how yet again, with very few exceptions, indigenous Americans have served throughout these discussions as represented objects, rather than as speaking subjects. Like the gathering in Arizona, I see that in intervening in a history of representation and mediation, this account might have run the risk of reproducing it. A simultaneous exercise in Jewish-Indian tribal and universal identification, Elaine Heumann Gurian’s essay “A Jew among the Indians: How Working Outside of One’s Own Culture Works” (1991) began as a paper delivered in New York City at the Jewish Museum Association meeting. Gurian begins by invoking shared Jewish-Indian “tribal” identities, imagining how she might introduce herself at an “Indian pow wow”: “My name is Elaine Heumann Gurian. I am a member of the tribe of Israel, and I will speak to you in my native language—Hebrew. In that language, my name is Mara-Tov bat Hanach vie [sic] Hannah, and I will sing to you the prayer of joy at our gathering—the Shehecheyanu.”She continues:“My position on staff [of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI)] offers me an opportunity to view the formation of an ethnically focused museum from a particular vantage point—that of the insider/outsider. As a person deeply attached to my ethnicity, I feel I can connect to other groups in a sympathetic way. Yet I’m clear that I am not of these people. I am also not a ‘wannabe.’”4 She then moves from a discussion of the NMAI planning process (the museum had not yet been built) into her concerns for Jewish museums. She wonders how to present histories free from “romance,”with multiple perspectives and with a sense of how dynamic people, traditions, and cultures really are. She worries about using artifacts in ways that might be deemed offensive. She has concerns about which voices are designated as authoritative and authentic. She worries about alienating or confusing the visitor who is an “outsider” to the culture on display. She worries about overly rigid notions of identity boundaries between insiders and outsiders. She has concerns that“pride and self-esteem”in one’s own history can“breed intolerance for others.” And finally, she worries: “Are we emphasizing the commonalities among all...

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