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Journal of American Folklore 117.464 (2004) 199-200



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Mihtohseenionki: (The People's Place). Permanent exhibit organized by the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis, Indiana. Curated by Ray Gonyea.

Museums press their thumbs into lumps of time, kneading eras and pulling them gently into new shapes that return to our minds to generate fresh insights and potent realizations. The skilled sculpting of the past into forms for the present that speak to the future requires a sensitivity to the ways in which time can be perceived.

This sensitivity is all the more important when dealing with American Indian cultures. American Indian groups grapple continuously with non-Native assumptions that attenuate the Native present and truncate the Native future. Disney freezes the American Indian timeline with Pocahontas, stranding Indians forever in animated images of buckskin and corn. Sports teams halt the timeline with mascots bearing war paint and tomahawks. Such comic strips as Tumbleweeds, such comic programs as F Troop, and even such comely images as the Land O' Lakes butter logo all serve to emphasize an imagined and exaggerated past at the expense of a real present and a worthy future.

When museums seek to portray American Indian cultures, they risk perpetuating this backward chronological view. The classic museum tableaux—mannequins of copper-colored plastic posed eternally in scenes of fire building, deer skinning, and corn grinding—further cement American Indians in the past, overriding any alternate theories suggested by the presence of Cherokee or Mohawk or Navajo visitors in the crowd. Curators who take on the task of depicting American Indian cultures must come to terms with the tension between historically oriented displays and the misunderstandings that come with them.

"Mihtohseenionki: (The People's Place)," a permanent exhibition on the second floor of the Eiteljorg Museum, in Indianapolis, features the cultures of American Indians indigenous to the Midwest—emphasizing the Miami, the Delaware, the Potawatomi, and others from the "Indiana Region"—and it takes on time as a challenge. (The name is pronounced MID-TOH-say-nee-ON-ghee.) A poster in the exhibit puts time in its cultural place:

Time as a river is more a Euro-American concept of time, with each event happening and passing on like a river flows downstream.

Time as a pond is a more Native American concept of time, with everything happening on the same surface, in the same area—and each event is a ripple on the surface.

(Dave Edmunds [Cherokee], professor 2001)

The Eiteljorg is a bustling place, active with viewers and strollers and shoppers. But climb the museum's stairs, turn sharply right, and enter the darkened room. The soft lights calm the mind and slow the heart. Tree trunks sweep upward from floor to ceiling. The carpet is dark with a pattern of suggested leaves. Resist the pull of individual displays for a moment, and you notice that the lights in the cases undulate between dim and dark, adding breath to the still-life scenes.

This particular inlet in time's pond carries its peaceful theme further, offering comfortable, overstuffed chairs and sofas that lure weary visitors into passing the time there. And all around are myriad moments of Midwestern Indian culture. A twenty-seat theater shows a fifteen-minute, present-tense video, "Being Miami." A beautiful wooden setting offers an interactive computer display, showing information about Native life and circumstance from four different times: 1673-1701, 1701-1768, 1769-1794, [End Page 199] and 1795-?. One path through the interaction shows the steady loss of Indian land, until at last none is left. But it does not end with the twinkling out of the final ember; Indian groups, it explains, are currently buying back their traditional lands, pointing to a more hopeful and enriching future.

All throughout the display cases and viewing areas are reflections of multiple times. A display of moccasins is accompanied by a "Curator's Notebook," which presents artful sketches that show how to make them; similar notebooks enrich other displays as well. Additional interactive displays introduce visitors to contemporary...

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