Concourse and Periphery: Planning the National Museum of the American Indian

The following article was first published in 2002, about a year and a half before the completion of the National Museum of the American Indian building on the mall in Washington DC and well before the celebrations that accompanied the opening of its doors to the public on September 21, 2004. Most of my research on the topic of the long planning process for the architecture itself and for those aspects of exhibition planning and operations strategies that had already been discussed were carried out between 1997 and 1998, funded as a part of a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art and Humanities. The basic essay was composed in 1999–2000 during my tenure as Sylvan C. Coleman and Pamela Coleman Memorial Fund Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A great deal has happened since that time. The documents, inspirational comments, and prognostications of the many key figures immersed in this process have now played out in form. A version of the Plexiglas model that original architect Douglas Cardinal had "sketched as a spirit" is now corporeal, although Cardinal himself has long since left the project.¹ Even in freezing cold weather, substantial crowds gathered, waiting their turn to enter the museum. It has become a great public attraction and, at the same time, the subject of quite serious criticism among members of the press and, anecdotally, among scholars. In many ways, their objections are related to the challenges that were noted and discussed in this article: the attempt to delineate broad principles derived from the concerns of Native constituents and consultants. These were meant to be explicated in a fairly general manner, through the use of abstraction.

Although several writers have admired the architectural expression of the delineated principles or "commonalities" discussed during the planning process, they were disappointed by the manner in which these same general concepts informed the exhibitions. For example, Paul Richards of the Washington Post commended the building but had his high hopes dashed when he stepped inside: "Its exhibits are disheartening, their installations misproportioned, here too sparse and there too cramped . . . things both new and ancient, beautiful and not, all stirred decoratively together in no important order that the viewer can discern."² Edward Rothstein of the New York Times thought the design of the building itself "hints at what might have been, a collection of surpassing and aesthetic cultural value," although he did cite some imperfections that have diminished the ultimate power of the architecture since Cardinal's departure. For example, the northern mall-facing façade has been significantly simplified. Much more importantly, the transfer of agency to the authority of Native curators resulted in the insistence on a somewhat unified and therefore simplified Native perspective, and this seemed gravely insufficient to him. "It is not a matter of whose voice is heard," he complained, "It is a matter of detail, qualification, nuance and context. It is a matter of scholarship."³

Most objections are similar, centering on the relative lack of specificity in excessively concept-driven exhibition strategies. Critics had expected to encounter more Western-style scholarship, the authoritative voice of academically trained curators, and more of the particulars of history. They certainly expected to see more of the treasured works of art from the renowned collection of George Heye. Instead, a very new and different type of public platform was constructed for this project by the authors of the Way of the People planning documents. Planners had framed their instructions on the basis of the historic shift to Native authority made by this institution. Designers and curators took their cues from the "commonalities" that were founded on this mandate.

It is not my intention to reexamine this article to discover how prophetic it was. It is much more interesting to revisit in order to discover how concepts and recommendations were realized, to trace something of the relationship between...