(Un)disturbing Exhibitions: Indigenous Historical Memory at the NMAI

I was recently in Washington DC to visit the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). There, I found myself amid some of the most beloved and known monuments and museums in the "nation's" capital. Every year, people flock to see these monuments to former leaders, to visit museums and gain a specific perspective of U.S. history. Most monuments act as conspicuous bookmarks in American history, embedding certain historical events, figures, or places in the nation's collective memory. Places such as the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial in DC or the Statue of Liberty in New York attract visitors from around the world to pay homage to these assumed great leaders and the freedoms they represent. However, when we look at monuments and museums, we must also understand the different meanings these monuments represent for multiple publics.

I arrived in the District of Columbia with a different perspective, one critical of the impacts of European and American imperialism on Indigenous peoples. As I visited different memorials, monuments, and museums in DC, I was struck by the patriotic and nationalistic rhetoric, all the while remembering the countless Indigenous lives lost or affected by this nation's expansion. I witnessed the different publics visiting monuments and bringing with them their own awareness or investment of that particular historical memory. When different publics traverse monuments or spaces, conflicting historical memories likewise intersect and reveal underlying tensions and conflicting interpretations about the past.

Caroline Chung Simpson, in An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture, 1945–1960, suggests that Japanese American identity and internment constituted an "absent presence" in post–World War II American society. Her work seeks to understand "how history and memory are negotiated when the need to remember an event challenges the ideals of democratic nationalism and the narrative unity of nation that historical discourses ostensibly provide."¹ The "absence," or deliberate exclusion, of the "other's" history works to construct and reify the master narrative, as does the utilization of a historical "presence," or inclusion, that only benefits the dominant narrative. Indigenous history, I suggest, is situated as the "absent presence" in American history, deliberately erased or radically transformed to maintain the master narrative. Its discursive inclusion, a retelling or distortion of Indigenous history is designed to justify the colonizers' violence and exploitation of Indigenous peoples, lands, and resources. The processes of colonization have created this "absence" in the American historical memory, which shapes how Indigenous history, space, or place have been and continue to be renamed, redefined, and destroyed.

Museums in particular are educational tools used to create and perpetuate specific ideologies and historical memories. They have played a prominent role in defining the visibility of Indigenous peoples and cultures in America historical memory by creating exhibits of Indigenous peoples based on perceptions and views that benefit and justify American colonialism. As an elementary school student, I learned about the damaging representations of Indigenous peoples in museum exhibitions during a class visit to the Denver Museum of Natural History. We viewed the museum's American Indian exhibit, which depicted Natives as scantily clad, uncivilized savages carrying spears and bows and arrows. This had an enormous impact on me. I knew where I came from and who I was—that we were not as they depicted—and I stood there as students, knowing I was Indigenous, looked at me, at the exhibit, and back at me. I cried from the hurt and humiliation I felt as some of the students laughed. My teacher was unsympathetic to my hurt and objections to such imagery. Through this experience, I gained firsthand knowledge of the tenuous relationships museums have with their publics, especially the Indigenous peoples of America.

As with the Denver Museum of Natural History of the 1970s, many museums dehumanize Indigenous peoples with their exhibits. These museums, private and public, teach "America" that Indigenous peoples are peoples of the past who never "progressed" forward. Dehumanizing exhibits of Indigenous peoples with and among animals dramatically contrast with those of Europeans and Americans who are portrayed as making progress in...