Gym Shoes, Maps, and Passports, Oh My! Creating Community or Creating Chaos at the NMAI?

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

For the September 2004 First Americans Festival, Washington Post journalists attempted to convey what they observed when thousands of Indigenous peoples converged on the nation's capital to celebrate the National Museum of the American Indian's grand opening. Newspaper articles on the First Americans Festival tended to be positive, undoubtedly because reporters saw "real" Indians in bright colors, beads, buckskin, and feathers; nevertheless, items seemingly out of place puzzled them. One reporter expressed his surprise at seeing Indians in full regalia with cell phones, describing the image as "almost anachronistic." He expressed astonishment at seeing Indian families pushing high-end strollers, Indians drinking Pepsi, and Indians not looking "classically Indian," never explaining what "classically Indian" means.¹ While reports on the First Americans Festival tended to be congenial, coverage of the museum was mixed. Surprisingly, some journalists even expressed annoyance. For example, Marc Fisher proclaims, "The museum feels like a trade show in which each group of Indians gets space to sell its founding myth and favorite anecdotes of survival." Fisher appears to admonish the Smithsonian for "let[ting] the Indians present themselves as they wish to be seen," hinting at the irresponsibility of a decision that led to the museum's failure to provide its visitors with the tools they need to "judge the Indians' version of their story."²

In similar fashion, Paul Richard's museum review begins with a critique of curators for exhibits that he describes as confusing and unclearly marked.³ He compares his failure to understand the exhibits with the Puritans' failure to make sense of the Indians they had encountered nearly four hundred years ago. He notes that just as the Puritans felt stymied, confused, and unable to "explain" or account for the Indians, so too does he feel confused and unable to explain the Indians he encounters in the museum. His confession demonstrates how little some have learned about the peoples whose lands they now occupy. As a result of his bewilderment, Richard cautions potential visitors that "the new museum . . . is better from the outside than it is from the in," a statement that clearly indicates the way he "knows" Indians—superficially. From this appraisal, his review moves beyond a mere evaluation; his annoyance and confusion evolve into an attack. Richard's apparent rage puzzled me and left me wondering how my perception of the museum would differ. When I attended the museum later that day, I attempted to make sense of his review by contrasting his descriptions and questions with my own observations.

Many of the exhibits do resist easy classification, but these displays contribute to the museum's strength as well as to its subversive characteristics. Annoyed that the museum's "Indians" remain beyond classification, at least in his estimation, Richard charges curators with creating an anomalous claim: "Indians are all different; overarching Indianness makes them all alike." Exasperated at this perceived claim's presumed inconsistency, which disrupts his notion of what an Indian is, he angrily asks and then replies: "Well, which is it? The museum can't make up its mind." Richard dismisses Indigenous peoples' belief that their shared experiences connect them historically, cognitively, and spiritually in ways that resist uncomplicated classification or codification by appearance, blood quantum, or cdib number.

Yet, just as journalists want their "Indians" to remain familiar, untouched...