Speaking Sovereignty and Communicating Change: Rhetorical Sovereignty and the Inaugural Exhibits at the NMAI

The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) has attracted a great deal of attention from museum visitors and scholars alike since its opening in 2004, and with that attention has come a multitude of critiques. From the initial reviewers from major newspapers who criticized the museum for its perceived lack of scholarship and structure, to Native critics who worried that the exhibits lacked enough (or the most appropriate) historical context, from reviewers who praised the example set by the NMAI in its collaborative model, to Native visitors who found a great deal of satisfaction in seeing their stories told, reactions to the NMAI have run the gamut.¹ What is generally recognized among scholars is that the NMAI provides a unique model for museum practice and that never before has the Smithsonian been willing to collaborate on this scale with Native peoples.

As such, the NMAI offers one of the most public platforms for Native peoples to address an audience of non-Native visitors. Using Beverly Singer's term "cultural sovereignty," Amanda J. Cobb asserts the extraordinary Native influence on the site, in that "every aspect of the museum, including its very purpose and function, had to be filtered through Native core cultural values and adapted accordingly. . . . [In] the case of the NMAI, that means integrating the old ways and core cultural values and traditions into the very concept of what a museum is and can be."² The recognition of cultural sovereignty is arguably one of the main functions, if not the primary function, of the NMAI.

However, the act of communicating cultural sovereignty in a museum involves more than simply asserting it. The NMAI is situated in the heart of the US capital and the Smithsonian Institution, and, given this location, it must simultaneously navigate the diverse audiences that visit and the influence of the "museum" as an institutionalized communicative structure. Tribally owned and operated museums and cultural centers are able to fully prioritize their Native audiences in whatever way the local tribal community sees fit; conversely, the NMAI is largely obligated to reflect the Smithsonian's values and work with the majority non-Native audience. The NMAI is thus a balancing act that works in a weighted framework between asserting the sovereignty of the Native audiences and saying something so foreign that a non-Native audience does not understand.

Rhetoricians generally acknowledge the advantage of identifying with one's audience to build one's ethos, but Ernest Stromberg points out that the particular issue for Native peoples using identification as a rhetorical tool is "to bridge communication divisions while maintaining an insistence of difference."³ Likewise, even the communicative framework itself can pose a problem. As Simon Ortiz has said of the English language in general, Native users of adapted colonial languages must always consciously work to avoid accidentally speaking what they do not mean through a language that carries colonial baggage.⁴ I would argue that the same applies to the communication that takes place within museums. The great advantage to adapting museum structures to Native uses is that those structures are a far-reaching communicative venue with a wide audience; yet the problem with the same is that the museum communicative structure and its audiences already have expectations of Native peoples and what museum exhibits should say.

I argue in this article that if the NMAI wishes to make a communicable assertion of cultural sovereignty that avoids speaking something not intended to its audiences, then the very act of communication—the rhetorical frame itself—must be examined. This is not to argue for pandering to non-Native audiences; as Cobb writes, "To do so would be tantamount to calling the entire project—a project so significant to cultural sovereignty and continuance—a failure."⁵ But in order to learn from, refine, and strengthen this highly rhetorical and sovereign endeavor, the NMAI bears reexamination in those terms. With this in mind, I use Scott Richard Lyons's sense of "rhetorical sovereignty" to analyze the NMAI's three inaugural exhibits in order to reveal in sharper...