A Place To Bring The Tribe

By Richard Lacayo/Washington

George Gustav Heye was a whimsically self-indulgent New York City banker who plowed his millions into a massive collection of American Indian objects. He discovered his life's mission as a 23-year-old engineering graduate of Columbia University, working as a railroad-construction superintendent in Kingman, Ariz. It was 1897, a moment--after American soldiers had killed Sitting Bull, massacred hundreds at Wounded Knee and captured Geronimo--when the white conflict with Native Americans was at last almost entirely decided in the settlers' favor. Indians were beginning their final transition in the white imagination from serious competitors to something like endangered species, figures who could be romanticized or despised, sometimes both at once. Years later, Heye described his conversion experience as a collector: "One night I noticed the wife of one of my Indian foremen biting on what seemed to be a piece of skin. Upon inquiry I found she was chewing the seams of her husband's deerskin shirt in order to kill the lice." He bought the shirt.

For nearly 60 years after that, Heye bought just about every Indian artifact he could get his hands on--Kwakiutl doorposts, Mayan jade idols, Lenape wampum belts, Nootka whaleboats, plus every kind of headdress, breastplate and beaded skirt. You can see why he was once described as a man who "felt that he couldn't conscientiously leave a reservation until its entire population was practically naked." By the time he died, in 1957, he had amassed about 800,000 items and opened an overburdened private museum in Manhattan.

For a long time, Heye's was a collection in search of a larger home. Now it has one more spectacular than even that insatiable man could have hoped for. Next week the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian, for which Heye's collection serves as the nucleus, opens on a prominent corner of the National Mall in Washington, four-plus acres that adjoin both the heavily trafficked National Air and Space Museum and the iconic I.M. Pei--designed East Wing of the National Gallery of Art. A friend of Heye's speculated that his collection may have been a response to his father, a millionaire inventor of equipment used to drill oil from beneath the land that native tribes once occupied. By buying their cultural patrimony, Heye was giving money back to the natives in compensation for the riches they never made from their oil. At the same time, he was also besting the old man by getting more of their wealth than his father ever did. If you happen to be an Indian, or even if you don't, you can't much enjoy the thought of native culture being reduced to a pawn in some white guy's father-son competition. But as it turns out, it's the Indians, by way of this museum, who are getting to make all the moves in the endgame. The showplace is directed, curated and staffed largely by Native Americans and conceived through years of consultation with tribal groups all over the western hemisphere. The tribes are using Heye's collection to present themselves as they see themselves, not as the white man has preferred to show them. Checkmate? It's too soon to tell, but the game is bound to get interesting.

It is quite a setting in which to tell the tale. The flexes and curves of the museum's honey-colored limestone walls are meant to evoke wind-sheared Western mesas, and they do. (You can be forgiven if the cantilevered plate at the uppermost story makes it hard not to think of the Starship Enterprise too. There is no one high-minded enough not to notice.) In keeping with the themes of nature that are threaded all through the display areas, it's a building landscaped with 150 species of trees and shrubs in a design guided by Donna House, a Navajo ethnobotanist. There's also a lily pond, plantings of corn, beans, squash and tobacco, and massive Canadian boulders. This being Washington, the rocks double as security barriers.

In imitation of many Indian dwellings, the main entrance of the museum faces east, toward the rising sun--and also toward the nearby dome of the Capitol, headquarters of the Great White Fathers who repeatedly authorized the theft of Indian lands but who also provided about $120 million of the museum's $219 million price tag. (The remainder came from private funding, a third of it contributed by Indian tribes.) Inside and out there are passages in this building good enough to bear comparison to the suavely rippling walls of Alvar Aalto, the great Finnish apostle of forms derived from nature. They bring to mind even more strongly the work of Douglas Cardinal, architect of the lyrical swells of the Canadian Museum of Civilization near Ottawa. It was Cardinal, a Blackfoot, who won the original commission in 1993 to design the American Indian museum, in affiliation with other architects, only to be dismissed from the project five years later in a bitter dispute over deadlines. A number of other firms and consultants were eventually brought in to revise and complete Cardinal's scheme, but in its essential outlines the museum still bears his stamp, which is why, for all the turmoil of the design process, it's a superior addition to a mall that has more than its share of Bureaucratic Modern.

As for what's inside, when the visitors start flowing in--the museum expects 4 million a year--they may be surprised by what they find. This is not a museum truly devoted to artifacts from the past, though it has plenty of them. It's not even much devoted to historical summary at all. You will search in vain for one of those wall-size timelines or for prominent wall texts on Little Big Horn or Chief Joseph. The people behind this place have decided to tell the story a little differently.

The major display areas are divided into three themes. "Our Universes" is about different forms of tribal knowledge, cosmologies and creation myths. "Our Peoples" deals with events that Native Americans see as crucial to their histories, like the establishment of the U.S.-Mexican border that abruptly divided Southwest desert tribes. "Our Lives" offers scenes and artwork from contemporary life, in which running shoes have replaced moccasins, in a world where some Indians live on reservations, some live in rainforests and quite a few live in Chicago. In each of the three sections, there are smaller display areas. Each one is devoted to one of 24 tribes, whose members present relevant experiences of tribal life. The exhibitions in these areas will be regularly rotated, a way of eventually representing many of the hundreds of tribes across two continents.

"It's not just a question of objects," says W. Richard West Jr., the museum's director, a Southern Cheyenne. "Native people don't see their own world in ethnographic terms." They also aren't interested in presenting their heritage as so many delectable glass-case curiosities or in having their history understood chiefly through the lens of their centuries of struggle with European settlers, however crucial that event may be. It's a history, after all, that begins some 10,000 years before the white man arrived and extends into the age of hip-hop and the Internet. "There was a tremendous 'before,'" says West, meaning before 1492. "There will be a tremendous 'after.'"

Many of the objects the museum possesses are not just objects. Some are regarded by Native Americans as living, spirit-infused things. The museum has even trained the staff to accommodate visitors who decide to make spur-of-the-moment offerings. It has also returned more than 2,000 sacred objects to tribes that said they were improperly seized by Heye's voracious collecting teams.

It is part of the evolving world of museums, operating under the influence of everything from theme parks to installation art, that presentations make ever more of their points through mood and metaphor rather than written information. This museum is no exception. One long, curving display case holds hundreds of guns and rifles, from finely engraved Spanish pistols to modern Glocks, to bring home the ways in which force has always been the final arbiter in dealings between natives and settlers. Would it be useful somewhere to have that old-fashioned timeline too? Jolene Rickard, a professor at the University at Buffalo and a Tuscarora Indian, who is a guest curator, doesn't think so. "There are other places where you can learn the exact dates of the Trail of Tears," she says. "It's less important to me that someone leave this museum knowing all about Wounded Knee than that they leave knowing what it takes to survive that kind of tragedy." The "tremendous 'before'" is still part of this place. But the "tremendous 'after'" is what the people here care about most.