A Different Sort of (P)Reservation: Some Thoughts on the ...rfrank/class_web/ES-114A/Week 5...around a drum" (1995:112). The NMAI was given the mandate to develop a public museum devoted

78 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 19 NUMBER 2

A Different Sort of (P)Reservation: Some Thoughtson the National Museum of the American Indian

Allison Arieff

"Aren't bows and arrows sometimes justbows and arrows?" (Burchard 1991:59)

In the past decade, for a variety of reasons—e.g.,the gains of feminism and the civil rights move-ment, the profusion of mass media, a growing

awareness of non-Western/non-European cultures,the increasing commodification of cultural produc-tion, and the emergence of postmodern1 theory, toname a few—the museum has become increasinglycontested terrain, and its practices the subject ofvoluminous critique. What is the role of the museumin contemporary society? What is exhibited and whatis excluded? Who is to interpret the material and towhat end? Responses to such questions, including thereinstallation of permanent collections, temporary ex-hibitions, academic treatises, institutional directives,and even a children's book, Make Your Own Museum2,have proliferated in recent years, typically with theintent to subvert traditional museum practice by chal-lenging narratives, modes of display, and strategies ofrepresentation. The new National Museum of theAmerican Indian in New York City is one institutionthat has worked to subvert the museum status quo,but whether it stands as a model for future institutionsor as an object lesson in the dangers of trying to beall things to all people is debatable. In this essay, I willaddress critically the efforts of the NMAI, with theintent of placing it within the larger cultural discourseon museums and the representation of cultures andtheir objects.

The museum has historically validated the valuesand beliefs of the powerful majority, while at the sametime justifying its own existence through a rhetoric ofsocial benevolence and equality. It has been struggling

to define itself and its audience for centuries. A crea-tion of the modern world, the museum was illequipped to represent various collective cultures andidentities. The pervasive disenchantment with mod-ernity and its institutions in recent decades, hasforced the museum to reconsider its purpose andpractices. With the recognition that culture is anhistorical construct comes the realization that ourrepresentations of it are incomplete. As James Cliffordhas written, culture is neither an object to be de-scribed nor definitively interpreted but is instead"contested, temporal, emergent" (1986:18-9). Impli-cated in this emergence is representation and expla-nation—both by insiders and outsiders. Thisdiscovery has had serious implications for the mu-seum.

Inherently resistant to alteration, the goal of themuseum has always been definitive—not provisionalor variable—interpretation and explanation. By re-moving objects from their original contexts and mak-ing them stand for abstract wholes, museumcollections create the illusion of an adequate repre-sentation of the world. Modes of display overridespecific histories of production and appropriation.3

Systems of ordering and classification promote andvalidate notions of progress, universality, and objec-tive truth. The advancement of a binary frame ofreference, typical of Western thought, serves to un-dermine external realities of diversity—high/low,us/them, black/white. As Douglas Crimp has writtenthe history of museology is "a history of the variousattempts to deny the heterogeneity of the museum,to reduce it to a homogeneous system or series"(1983:49). But the traditional museological practicesoutlined above are no longer tenable and institutions

Museum Anthropology 19(2): 78-90. Copyright © 1995, American Anthropological Association.

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN 79

have been forced to respond. As a result, I wouldargue that the museum has been undergoing aKuhnsian paradigmatic shift.

The inclusion and representation which the mu-seum currently seeks have, however, never reallyexisted. This is not to say that these goals are notworthwhile, but rather to point out that the democ-ratization of the museum is not simply a question ofreverting to the way things were. Current vogue not-withstanding, the basic demands of museum reformhave remained fairly consistent for the last century.The rhetoric of the stated aims of museums and thepolitical realities of their actual functioning are, asTony Bennett (1990, 1992) explains, inherently con-tradictory. Though there exists a desire for opennessand accessibility to all, the museum succeeds bril-liantly at differentiating populations. Easily catego-rized on the basis of class, race, and especiallyeducation, the museum audience tends to be an insu-lar group possessing a particular form of culturalcapital. Museums, nevertheless, engage themselves inan unending quest to furnish equality of access.

Despite its exclusionary practices, the museum issustained by the fiction that it provides an adequaterepresentation of the world. Even as the paradigm ofthe white Western male as representational norm isslowly shifting, the museum will never be all-inclu-sive, and will never adequately represent anyone oranything. Still, it does a good job of faking it—pre-senting itself as an arbiter of truth and universality.While the demands the museum generates are insa-tiable, as Bennett explains, people continue to workto address them. Firmly rooted in the modern ideol-ogy of representational adequacy, museum reform isan inherently incomplete project. But in critiquingmuseological practice, I do not want to discount thevalidity or merit of museums. My analysis is moti-vated by a desire to sustain their viability and rele-vance for contemporary society.

The National Museum of the AmericanIndian

A brief history of events leading up to the openingof the National Museum of the American Indian(NMAI) is in order. Its founder, George Gustav Heyewas a New York banker who over a fifty-four yearperiod, amassed one of the largest collections of Na-tive American objects in the world. Until recently, thecollection was displayed in the Museum of the Ameri-can Indian in upper Manhattan, with Heye as directorfrom 1916 until his death in 1957. The American

Museum of Natural History had hoped to receive atleast part of the collection, but in 1987 negotiationsbroke down and the trustees of the Museum of theAmerican Indian became officially affiliated with theSmithsonian Institution.4 The NMAI and the Smith-sonian planned the relocation of the Heye collectionto a new national museum in the last available loca-tion on the Mall in Washington D.C. , just east of theNational Museum of Air and Space. President GeorgeBush signed legislation establishing the National Mu-seum of the American Indian in 1989. The NativeAmerican Grave Protection and Repatriation Act(H.R. 5237), designed to "to facilitate a more openand cooperative relationship between Native Ameri-cans and museums"5 became Public Law 101-601 in1990. Recognizing the importance of transferringcontrol of Indian culture to Indians themselves, therepatriation law represented a significant shift inmuseum policy and practice.

In October 1994, the museum opened in its tem-porary home at One Bowling Green in lower Manhat-tan. The museum's proximity to the Statue of Libertyand the new Ellis Island Museum makes it a primetourist destination. (It also lies along a former Algon-quin trade route.) Indeed, all of the museum's exhibitsadopt travel as a device—the three inaugural exhibi-tions are titled Journey of Creation, This Path WeTravel, and All Roads Are Good. Visitors to lowerManhattan can "experience" the history of migrationand immigration in the course of the afternoon. Acultural resource center dedicated to conservationand research is planned for 1997 in Suitland, Mary-land. The opening of the Washington D.C. museum isscheduled for 2001, but given the current culturalclimate, this date is not definite.6

One can view the decision to insert a monument toNative cultures inside the 1907 Beaux Arts buildingthat also houses a federal bankruptcy court, as a bitof postmodern jouissance, or alternatively as yet an-other instance of American subordination of Nativeculture (Fig. 1). The building's status as a landmarkprecluded architectural modification, thus dictatingthe museum's restricted floorplan. The exhibitionspace is limited to a narrow path that snakes aroundthe perimeter of the building's first floor. The spaciousrotunda which one encounters when entering thebuilding is left empty—its use requires governmentalconsent. The NMAI can use it for museum receptions.This central space could be utilized imaginatively butthe displays are relegated to the museum's periphery.As one reviewer described it, "the Heye Center has


1. George Gustav Heye Center for the National Museum of the American Indian,Smithsonian Institution. Photo: Roy Gumpel.

been developed as a parasite, the Customs House itshost. With no exterior markers other than signage, themuseum gains civic significance from the landmark'sstatus. But in return the center . cedes any possi-bility of contesting the values for which the CustomsHouse stands" (Urbach 1994:88). The museum iswholly contained by the architectural space, a photo-graphic banner at the foot of Broadway is the onlyindication of its presence inside. Susan Power, a Da-kota Sioux writing in Bazaar magazine, has inter-preted the arrangement quite differently. "For manyNative Americans a circle symbolizes the universe, sothe museum's exhibits end where they begin. To viewthe exhibits is to circumnavigate the globe or dancearound a drum" (1995:112).

The NMAI was given the mandate to develop apublic museum devoted to Native American culture.There were few models for the NMAI's organizers tofollow, however W. Richard West, Jr, Southern Chey-enne, was appointed founding director of the museumin 1990. The institution is largely a Native Americanundertaking most of the museum's staff and trus-

tees, and all of its artists and selectors are of Nativeancestry. This is atypical—few museums devoted toindigenous culture have been put into the hands ofindigenous populations. Represented by others Na-tive Americans have tended either to be primitivizedin natural history museum dioramas or excluded(with a few exceptions) from art museums. Doesself-portrayal constitute a significant departure fromtraditional museum practice? Has it done so thus far?It is important to acknowledge that, given the new-ness of such collaborative efforts, there will be differ-ences of opinion and interpretation among differentsegments of the concerned population, such as indige-nous peoples, anthropologists, art historians, and oth-ers. How could there not be? The NMAI's efforts atsubverting traditional museum practices bear this out.

Cultural representation is not a problem to besolved but is rather an ever-evolving process. This istrue for European and American museums—whichcontinue to grapple with the representation of com-plex and heterogeneous publics—and ethnic or non-Western museums alike. In the case of the NMAI, 1


believe that everyone's intentions were good, but thatthey were faced with a task of enormous complexity.What was the best way to display the Heye collectionof nearly one-million objects? As fine art? As artifact?On video? On computer? The NMAI, in a clear caseof curation by committee, opted for all of the above.While multivalent interpretation and explanation canwork to destabilize institutional authority, it can alsooverwhelm even the most curious and dedicated mu-seum visitor. Walking through the exhibition space, Ifelt I was thrust in the middle of dueling museologicalparadigms—unequal parts art, ethnographic, history,technology, and children's museums.

Journey of creationAn informal discussion with a number of museum

employees shed light on some of the problems thatultimately emerged in the three inaugural exhibi-tions.8 Initially, the curatorial staff of the originalMuseum of the American Indian was given the taskof selecting objects for a coffee-table book on the Heyecollection. The staff's (at this stage, primarily non-Na-tive) approach favored beauty over utility—Westernstandards of aesthetic quality were the admitted cri-terion. Through this glossy book of photographs, thecurators saw an opportunity to circulate objects con-sidered too fragile for display. When the works hadbeen selected, however, the curatorial staff was in-formed that these objects were now to comprise theinaugural exhibit of the new museum. Richard W Hilldeveloped a voluminous proposal for an exhibition,Creation's Journey: Masterworks of Native AmericanIdentity and Belief, in which he envisioned incorporat-ing themes of great importance. The section titlesread like a Jenny Holzer art installation: "Objects LiveWhen Used as Intended," "Journey of Interpretations:Search for Definitions," and "Refining the Art of Beingan Indian." But instead of choosing new objects tocorrespond with Hill's themes, the works pre-selectedfor the coffee-table book were used. This helps toexplain the disjointedness of the exhibit. Creation'sJourney attempts in a very small space to simultane-ously showcase objects as masterpieces, stress theirutility, illuminate their symbolism, express their spiri-tuality, contest their interpretation, and assert theirtimelessness.

Highlighting the ways in which various agentsconfer aesthetic, cultural, and economic value onobjects is a welcome effort as value is a subjective,transitory, and historically based category. Contraryto Kant's claim, the aesthetic disposition of the object

is not a gift of nature but is necessarily pluralistic andconditional. The NMAI's labels attempt to address themultiplicity of conditions responsible for the status ofthe object. The exhibition delivers what the pressrelease promises— "a multivoiced perspective thatrarely has been seen in museums before."

Indeed, multi-vocal interpretation has been em-braced wholeheartedly by the museum—some objectshave up to five explanatory labels. The exhibitionspace is invaded by a cacophony of voices from audio-tape and interactive video monitors. But this is mul-tivocality with a caveat—a binary is producedwhereby Native (meaning those with official tribalaffiliation) voices are deemed "authentic" andauthoritative, while the opinions of non-Natives comeoff as inferior or misinformed. Certainly, the erosionof the practice of speaking for "others" inherent inethnography is a welcome development. But while theright to self-representation is imperative, the NMAIcomes dangerously close to replicating the universal-izing tendencies characteristic of the very Westerninstitutions it purports to displace. The NMAI's rheto-ric would seem to advance the notion of a generic or"normal" Indian, and this has the effect of replacingone stereotypical representation with another—ho-mogenizing an inherently heterogeneous group ofpeople (Native Americans) in the process.

The notion of representing one's self is seductivebut, as anthropologist Virginia Dominguez points out,the ideology of the dominant group "so penetratesinto the underprivileged sections of a population thatthere is no guarantee that the representation of a selfproduced by members of the minority populationwould necessarily differ from the empowered group'srepresentation of their otherness" (1987:136). This isevident at the NMAI, a museum based on the collec-tion, albeit enormous, of one white male. The minor-ity population—in this case, Native Americans—mustgrapple at the NMAI with defining themselves notonly through and against dominant paradigms, butalso through the objects voraciously acquired byGeorge Heye. The banker/collector's criteria unavoid-ably colors any representation in this institution. Eachelement of his collection would have had a particularsignificance for him, divorced from its original intent.As these works go through processes of donation,repatriation, and reinstallation, their meanings aresimilarly transformed.

ObjectsThe designation of an object as art or artifact is


often contingent on its utility or lack thereof. This putsa spin on Karl Marx's concept of use-value and com-modities. Marx claimed that "nothing can have valuewithout being an object of utility" (1977:421). In theart world, however, the common object becomes artonly upon suspension of its utility. The collection, infact, represents the total aestheticization of use value.The further the object is removed from use value,Susan Stewart explains, the "more multivocal its ref-erentiality" (1993:151). Torn between whether topresent objects as art or artifact, the NMAI does both.In Creation's Journey, Cultural Resources DirectorClara Sue Kidwell and her colleagues try to questionWestern standards of aesthetic value, while at thesame time appropriating them. Presented under spot-lights and in vitrines, previously utilitarian objects areprivileged as fine art in the first corridor of the exhi-bition. Wall texts point out the timelessness of Nativecreations, for example, and describe them as master-pieces. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett suggests thatthe litmus test for art seems to be whether or not anobject can be stripped of its contingency and still "holdup." The contingency of the first few works on displayin Creation's Journey is wholly suppressed, calling fortheir interpretation on purely aesthetic terms. Here,the NMAI mimics the approaches of the Smithsonian'sNational Museum of African Art and Freer Gallery ofAsian Art—pristine, minimalist institutions that shuncontextualization in favor of aesthetic contemplation.The exhibition labeling repeatedly stresses that forIndians, art is inseparable from life. Accordingly, func-tional objects share the same space as decorative(market) baskets, jewelry, and the like. Not every-thing produced by non-Native Americans necessarilywarrants inclusion in the museum. To suggest thateverything does, again posits "other" populations asan entity to be represented.

The objects displayed at the NMAI do "hold up" andare quite remarkable, though you really have to con-centrate to see them in the midst of so much labelingand interactive media. Stephen Greenblatt (1991)advocates a balance between resonance—the powerof the displayed object to reach out beyond its formalboundaries to a larger world, to evoke in the viewerthe complex, dynamic cultural forces from which ithas emerged and for which it may be taken by aviewer to stand—and wonder, which he defines as thepower of the displayed object to stop the viewer in hisor her tracks, to convey an arresting sense of unique-ness, to evoke an exalted attention. Ideally, one hopesthat wonder will not be sacrificed at the expense of

resonance, but at the NMAI, wonder fights an. uphillbattle. The museum, as a reviewer for The Wall StreetJournal put it, "seems hellbent on upstaging its owntreasures" (Gamerman 1994:A16).

A few steps away from the pristine display that isthe beginning of Creation's Journey, objects are sud-denly presented in what Kirshenblatt-Gimblett de-scribes as in context—they are accompanied by labels,maps, aural commentary, video narration, and ethni-cally marked docents. Objects are also presented insitu, where "the object is a part that stands in acontiguous relation to an absent whole that may ornot be recreated" (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1991:388).A label written by project director Hill suggests that"objects like the bear clan hat might better servehumanity when used in the rituals for which theywere intended" yet the bear clan hat of Chilkat Tlingitof Northwest Alaska is exhibited on a glass enclosedpedestal in the center of the room, a metonym for apast tradition. If humanity is better served by theabsence of this hat than its presence, why is it here?The hat in isolation evokes loss; its partiality enhances"the aura of its 'realness'."

Few objects displayed in museums were ever meantto be seen there. Native and non-Western objectscontinue to go through a process of transformationwhereby one society's functional or ritual objects be-come another society's art. Value, as George Simmelobserved, "is never an inherent property of objects,but is a judgment made about them by subjects." Theplacement of objects and things in unlikely contextscan accelerate or enhance value. An object is bothaestheticized and commoditized by diversion, acquir-ing its privileged status as a result of the shift (Ap-padurai 1986:1).

Such decontextualization is at the heart of museumdisplay and has been better addressed elsewhere, asin artist Fred Wilson's 1992 reinstallation of the Se-attle Art Museum's permanent collection, titled TheMuseum: Mixed Metaphors. In Seattle's African galler-ies, Wilson displayed material culture evocative of adark and unknown Africa—traditional robes, masks,and tools, but interspersed among the artifacts werephotographs of modern Nigerian office buildings, acontemporary business suit, and a gold Rolex (bor-rowed from a museum trustee). The text of one ac-companying label read:

Certain elements of dress were used to categorizeone's rank in Africa's status-conscious capitals. Agray suit with conservatively patterned tie denotes


a businessman or member of government. Costumessuch as this are designed and tailored in Africa andworn throughout the continent.9

The presence of contemporary objects helped todisplace assumptions about Africa's primitive exist-ence, while the business suit cleverly illustrated thedanger of allowing an object to function as the symbolof an entire culture. As James Clifford explains, "wehave this ethnographic notion that some microcosmof culture inheres in a collected object. By putting itback into its 'context*, you can sort of produce theculture around it" (1989:153). Museological effortsto the contrary, once removed from its original placeof production or use, the object is always out ofcontext. It is the discrepancy between object andcontext in exhibitions, Clifford suggests, that shouldbe represented. Wilson attempts to illustrate this inhis refashionings of museum displays, but the NMAIseems unable to do so without descending into didac-ticism, as with the signage for the bear clan hat.

The museum barely touches on the complex anddelicate issues surrounding reburial and repatriation.In a recent paper presented to the American Anthro-pological Association, Nancy Rosoff, Assistant Curatorat the NMAI, addressed the traditional care practicesthat were being implemented at the museum's storagefacility:

The Human Remains Vault is smudged with a mix-ture of tobacco, sage, sweetgrass, and cedar everyweek Drawers containing sacred materials suchas bundles have been flagged so that people who arenot allowed to handle this material will be able toavoid it. . . . The katsina dolls or tithu are givenofferings of food everyday such as small pieces ofbread, fruit, vegetables, and potato chips. Theseofferings are made first thing in the morning, beforethe person making the offering has eaten, because itwould be disrespectful to eat before making offer-ings to the katsinas. (1994:6)

Rosoff's anecdotes illustrate that the transfer ofobjects is not a simple matter of exchange—collectinghas consequences. The acquisition, storage, and dis-play of objects are inextricably tied to discourses ofpower, knowledge, and domination. The proceduresRosoff describes could have been incorporated intomuseum displays as a way of addressing the conflictsover use and ownership.

References to cultural pillaging and colonial domi-nation are similarly oblique. For instance, the means

by which Heye managed to acquire over one millionNative American items (the largest single repositoryof aboriginal objects from the Americas) is allowed toremain a mystery to museum-goers. Heye's connois-seurship is applauded, as is his generosity as a donorbut no mention is made of his tendency (or determi-nation) to effectively pick clean the cultural produc-tions of entire populations. Heye did donate theobjects, so the museum must be careful not to bite thehand that fed it. But the often dark history of howobjects come to be displayed should not be kepthidden.

There is only one label in the museum, located atthe end of an unmarked hallway, that refers to geno-cide. (I later learned from NMAI staff that the artistsinvolved in This Path We Travel intended this space,which features glass-encased objects with no labelingwhatsoever, to serve as an arena where the objectscould speak for themselves.) The exhibition sectiontitled "Profane Intrusion" consists of a reconstructedschoolroom and the aforementioned interior of a res-ervation house. The open diorama is meant to illus-trate "how traditional values and civil rights wereviolated following European colonization and its af-termath." Apart from these two rooms, oddly enough,ethnographic practice is the target of far more wraththan governmental policy; anthropologists are chas-tised more than politicians.

All Roads Are Good/This Path We TravelThe collaboration with and celebration of contem-

porary Native peoples is made a top priority, yet thetrope of timelessness is so pervasive as to make onewonder whether or not this or any museum cansustain a living culture. The desire for self-repre-sentation informs the exhibition All Roads Are Good:Native Voices on Life and Culture. Twenty-three Indianartists, nominated by their respective communities,were asked to select objects from the Heye collectionon the basis of "artistic, cultural, spiritual and per-sonal significance." Their responses to the objectswere recorded and appear in the exhibit on video, aslabel text, or as part of interactive computer displays.It is not readily apparent that the first person narra-tives it provides are contemporary. Dates have beensuppressed in an effort to encourage the objects as"expressions of continuous cultures" rather than ex-amples of specific periods. The participants are frozenin time, particularly in the computer exhibits—a talk-ing head is in freeze frame, awaiting the touch of avisitor's hand to be activated. This mode of display


2. Installation view of This Path We Travel, NationalMuseum of the American Indian Photo: Katherine Fogden.

makes the works of one tribe or nation barely distin-guishable from the next, illustrating Dean MacCan-nell's contention that -every nicely motivated effortto preserve nature, primitives, and the past, and torepresent them authentically contributes to an oppo-site tendency, the present is made more unifiedagainst its past, more in control of nature, less aproduct of history5 (1989:83).

While the displacement of structure and linearnarrative can be an effective counter-hegemonic strat-egy, here it tends to promote confusion. The closestthe NMAI comes to probing the diurnal conflicts ofcontemporary Indian-ness is with NTV (Native Tele-vision)—a series of videos screened on a television inthe HUD tract house. Satiric versions of American talkshows, commercials, and newscasts address interra-cial relationships, racism, and popular misconcep-tions. NTV is effective in large part because of itsembrace of humor—a quality it shares with many

Native artists but one that is generally absent fromthe rest of the museum.10

NTV was conceived as part of This Path We Travel:Celebrations of Contemporary Native American Crea-tivity, the museum's third inaugural exhibition de-signed and produced by fifteen American Indianartists over a three-year period (Fig. 2). The NMAIpress release explains that the artists chose several"universal" Indian themes including creation, sacred-ness, gender, and environment. The natural world hasbeen designated the property of Native peoples hereand throughout the NMAI. The Indians' sacred rela-tionship to the land is run into the ground, while thedestructive tendencies of the non-Indian world aretacit y implied. This is problematic in its suggestionthat for Indians, the capacity to respect nature isinborn, an assumption that, however inadvertent,perpetuates pervasive notions of the primitive/noblesavage. In this respect, even the NMAI's repre-sentations of Native Americans differ little from thoseof a century ago—or even four hundred years ago asevidenced by the earliest surviving images of Nativepeoples.

The relentless longing for a return to Eden seemsto suggest that Native Americans live each day inregret over what has been lost. The NMAI purports tocelebrate contemporary Indians but can only do so byinextricably linking them to a glorified (and con-structed) primitive past. Toby Miller (1995) has ex-p ained how Australian Aboriginality is usedextensively by whites as a theoretical trope—as ameans of distinction, a laboratory for sodo-culturalstudy, focus of nostalgia. The "modern" has alwayslonged to know itself through differentiation from the"primitive." Australian and other aboriginal indige-nous populations have employed the discourse topolitical ends—i.e., land rights, reburial repatriationlegislation—but as Andrew Ross cautions "for thosenon-Westernized commoners who are likely still to beliving out rather than celebrating indigenous prac-tices, the outcome of this discourse of preservationdoes not usually lend itself to more democratic formsof self-determination, it tends to sustain, if not rein-vent, tribal and patriarchal forms of hierarchy" (1994:69).

The NMAI turns a blind eye to the approximatelysixty-five percent of Native Americans who live inurban areas, including nearly 37,000 who reside inthe five boroughs of New York City." The number ofIndians residing in New York exceeds the populationon any reservation, with the exception of the Okla-


homa land areas and the Navajo reservation, whichspreads across Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. Giventhe NMAI's location in downtown Manhattan and themedia campaign's exhortation to "Meet the Real Na-tive New Yorkers," the urban reality of Native popu-lations should have been addressed. Numerous Nativeartists are doing just that. Discussing his work in thepremier issue of Indian Artist magazine, Apache sculp-tor Bob Haozous (not included in the NMAI) had thisto say:

What I'm trying to do is reveal what has happenedto Native American people by the oppression we'veundergone and are still undergoing to reveal how weare changing but also to reveal how we romanticizeourselves and put ourselves on pedestals because ofour ancestors' behavior. Too often we don't reallylook at ourselves today. In most galleries, you seeimages of Indians that are untrue. They don't includewho we really are—very unhealthy in a lot of ways:alcoholism, violence, poverty, suicide, political prob-lems, loss of land, religion and language. If you lookat the images Indians project, they're beautiful im-ages of the past. But our ancestors weren't havingsuch a great time themselves.12

A non-critical celebration of the everyday ignoresthe equally "real" boredom, stress, and routine partsof everyday existence. As Larry Grossberg explains inhis discussion of power and daily life, it refuses toacknowledge the ways in which the structures ofoppression and domination are real and successful(1992:98).

This is evident in the museum's representation ofthe role of women in Native cultures. The treatmentof gender here is strictly essentialist, and reflectsagain a dependence on conventional binary struc-tures. Traditional male and female roles are rein-forced to the extreme. In the section on women, thevisitor walks through an artificial rock formation,evocative of Santa Fe interior design trends. Fertilityis accorded premier status—several large ceramicvessels, referred to in the press release as symbolicwombs, rest on the ground. The mouth of one parti-cularly large pottery jar houses a television thatbroadcasts Native women making tortillas. The ac-companying exhibition catalogue refers to the limitsplaced on women's activities in tribal societies butdoes not engage with issues of feminism or sex dis-crimination. I would have welcomed at least an ac-knowledgment of the problems of reconciling Westernfeminist discourse with the traditional roles assigned

to Indian women. Any investigation of the treatmentof Native women, however, would have necessitatedrelinquishing the romanticized Native past.

A spider web symbolizing the trickster-creator ofthe Lakota and the spirit-being Spider Woman of theNavajo, links the male and female sections in "asymbolic creation of both life and art." The repre-sentation of men throughout the museum essentiallyduplicates the traditional dioramas that even naturalhistory and anthropology museums are in the processof trying to replace. Men are presented as hunters,carvers, and drummers, who, through traditional ritesof passage, teach their sons to do the same. Maleidentity is addressed by tracing the stages of life frominfancy and youth to maturity and death, while por-trayals of women focus on their childbearing years. Awinding path depicting a curving rattlesnake (againwith the Eden-ic return) directs one's movementthrough the "Male" section of This Path We Travel. TheGrandfather Pole is erected as a (none-too-subtle)symbol of masculinity.

Grappling with the contemporaryThe contemporary artists included in the NMAI are

limited to those who are members of a federally orstate-recognized tribe, and whose work adheres to thestandards of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board Act,Public Law 101-644 passed by Congress in 1990. Thispiece of legislation created under the auspices of theDepartment of the Interior makes it illegal to offer,display, or sell "any good with or without a Govern-ment trademark in a manner that falsely suggests itis Indian produced, an Indian product, or the productof a particular Indian or Indian tribe or Indian artsand crafts organization." That Indian communitieswould seek government regulation of their artisticproduction strikes one as rather ironic. The legislationis designed to secure the "authenticity of Nativecultural production and to prevent non-Indians fromcapitalizing on Native traditions. It seems instead,however, to limit rather than enhance self-determina-tion and, as such, is deeply problematic. Should thegovernment be given the authority to regulate accept-able subject matter for artists? As Jean Fisher pointsout, no other ethnic group has their artistic identitylegislated by the state rather than by self-determina-tion (1992:50). By dictating what does and does notconstitute Native production, this legislation serves tomarginalize the artists who are supposedly protectedby it. The law is especially debilitating for thoseIndians not officially registered with tribes. There is


3. Jimrrue Durham, Not Joseph Beuys' Coyote, 1990.Collection Michelle Szwajcer, Antwerp Belgium.

Courtesy of the artist and Nicole Kla ,;sbrun Gallery.Photo: Philippe DeGobert.

a visible tension between aesthetics and custom, withthe excluded third term being the contemporary. Adesire to let Indian traditions evolve into new typesof cultural production is overshadowed by a need tocling to a mythical past. Works by contemporary art-ists that clearly appropriate from both Native andWestern sources have been accorded lower status andgenerally are absent from the NMAI.

The commodification of Native culture is addressedin a re-creation of the interior of a reservation house.A variety of foods bearing Indian names—MazolaCorn Oil, Big Red, etc. sit atop a refrigerator. A glasscase on the opposite wall displays pop culture Indianproducts ranging from a Village People album cover

to a synthetic wig of black braids and headband. Thepoint is well taken, but the museum gift shop down-stairs belies it. The museum has two stores: upstairsone finds arts, crafts, and reproductions in line withU.S. Public Law 101-644—i.e., objects chosen to "pro-voke the spirit and reflect the diversity inherent at theNational Museum of the American Indian."13 Down-stairs one finds mass-produced mini-tomahawks,drums, moccasins, and CDs of Native music for sale,along with "authentic" Native American food on theshelves—wild rice, jam, beans, and popcorn. A rubberstamp kit featuring the faces of Sitting Bull and otherlegendary Indian chiefs can be purchased for sevendollars, while thirty dollars will buy you a PrehistoricCave Painting Kit. The museum tableau aims to makethe audience sensitive to the danger of cultural stereo-types while the gift shop blatantly reinforces them.

In fact, the two gift shops demonstrate a tensioninherent in Native cultural production— "authentic"versus tourist art. In her argument against the insti-tutional disavowal of tounst art, Ruth Phillips (1994)explains that objects displaying traces of aboriginalnegotiation of Western artistic and economic systemshad to be excluded from formal programs of collectingand exhibiting in order to maintain the standardmuseum representation of Natives as "other." Pre-con-tact objects are privileged at the NMAI, the emphasison the involvement of contemporary artists notwith-standing. One would hope that the nostalgia for thepremodern could be replaced with an appreciation ofthe richness to be had from intercultural exchange.Appropriation is celebrated in Western art, charac-terizing, in fact, much of postmodern cultural produc-tion. Must it be denigrated in aboriginal culturalproduction? Phillips believes that viewing Indianworks as indicative of adaptability and survival wouldfunction to subvert the text of colonialism by disrupt-ing "the rarity value produced by the evolutionistcredo of the disappearing Indian" and by denying "theescapist fantasy of refuge from industrialism that wasstructured by the dialectics of primitivist discourse"(1994:114). Further, Fred Myers suggests that theemphasis on self-representation that informs currentdominant discourse has the tendency to dismiss outof hand cross-cultural productions of identity. Myersargues that these intercultural productions should beviewed as "redefinitions and rediscoveries of identityworked out in the face of challenging interrogationsfrom an 'other'" rather than as less sincere culturalexpressions (1994:680).

In his article "Borderzones: The 'Injun-uity' of Aes-


thetic Tricks," Indian artist Gerald McMaster (1995)writes of the struggle not only between Natives andnon-Natives, but within Native communities as well.He describes an ambiguous zone, a site of articulationfor the contemporary Native artists that is frequentlycrossed, lived, and negotiated. This space is conceivedas an area for practices of resistance and the articula-tion of self-identity in the postcolonial world (McMas-ter 1995). I do not think that the NMAI has allowedfor such a space. McMaster, a Plains Cree, is includedin the All Roads are Good exhibition but his installa-tion, consisting of a circular arrangement of mocca-sins in various sizes and colors, is pointedlyuncontroversial. "When the Native artist speaks as theauthor rather than the bearer of (another's) meaning,"Jean Fisher writes, "she or he precipitates an episte-mological crisis" (1992:45). But the Native voices atthe NMAI function to perpetuate rather than displacetraditional colonial discourse of the vanishing Indian.

Conspicuously absent from the NMAI are thosewhose work addresses relations with the white com-munity and problematizes Native identity and tradi-tions—James Luna, Jimmie Durham, Edgar Heap ofBirds, and Jaune Quick-To-See-Smith, are just a fewexamples. (Luna was invited to participate but chosenot to.) The work of these artists circulates throughthe non-Native art system—Durham and Quick-To-See-Smith have gallery representation in Soho, forexample, which almost seems to have been groundsfor their exclusion here (Fig. 3). One senses at theNMAI persistent refusal to allow for a voice thattransgresses the acceptable signifiers of Indianicity—a voice, that Fisher suggests, would "contaminate theaesthetic with the political" (1992:45).

The inclusion of a work like James Luna's TheArtifact Piece would have served to highlight the prob-lems inherent in cultural representation. By literallyexhibiting himself in San Diego's Museum of Man inthis 1986 work, Luna attempted to displace nostalgicnotions of a lost or disappearing culture so oftenassociated with the non-western display of objects.Label text described the scars on Luna's body asacquired in various drunken brawls—a reference tothe problem of alcohol on the reservation. Accompa-nying glass display cases held his personal effectsincluding 1960s rock-and-roll albums, shoes, and aUnited Farmworkers' Union button. Luna demon-strated how anything placed under glass in a museumsuddenly merits curiosity and attention. The site-spe-cific work also served as a counterpoint to the Mu-seum of Man's large collection of Edward Curtis'

photographs of vanishing Indians, who had posed incostume to document their own disappearance. Incontrast, the NMAI seems to yearn for the mythic pastLuna aims to deconstruct.

In The Artifact Piece, Luna performed the role ofethnographic specimen as part of an exhibit on the"contemporary Indian." This act echoed the experi-ence of Ishi, the Yahi Indian who was installed at theUniversity of California at Berkeley's Museum of An-thropology from 1911 until his death five years later.Humans have, in fact, been displayed as living raritiesfrom as early as 1501, when live Eskimos were exhib-ited in Bristol, England. "Other" peoples ranging fromTahitians to Cherokees to Hottentots have been show-cased in diverse locales including zoos, taverns, cir-cuses, and by the mid-nineteenth century, world'sfairs. Ethnicity continues to function as spectacle fora consuming public, in forms ranging from Hawaiianluaus to staged Aboriginal sand-painting at NewYork's Asia Society.14 The oft-cited goal of such eventsis to promote greater cultural understanding but whatis often delivered is a reinforcement of preconceivednotions about other cultures.

Recently, Luna again parodied notions of Indianauthenticity (particularly as expressed in rituals, fes-tivals, and pow-wows staged for tourists) in a 1993site-specific museum performance at the Smith-sonian's National Museum of American Art. As partof "The Shame-Man Meets El Mexican't at the Smith-sonian Hotel and Country Club," Luna put himself ondisplay and performed the quotidian. Visitors walkingthrough the museum came upon a "live" dioramafeaturing Luna and performance artist GuillermoGomez-Pena. Wearing ethnic attire, Luna brushed histeeth and vacuumed the floor like a "real" Indian.Luna's performance of the everyday no doubt makesa joke at the visitor's expense, but it also aims tounpack his or her assumptions. Luna "masquerades"as a "real" Indian, and with such humorous maskingof a "nonidentity (the other is never where he sought,since he is, in truth, of the Euro-American imagi-nary)," Fisher suggests, " . . . boundaries of the stereo-type are exceeded and the colonial text loses itscoherence" (1992:45).

The political and instructional function of suchperformances of ethnicity has been persuasively ar-gued by anthropologist Fred Myers. Issues of coloni-zation and authenticity always lurk in the wings, butculture-making is still taking place. While Luna's selfdisplay can be read as objectification, Myers suggeststhat the gaze of the audience/visitor is crucial to the


performer as an authentication of their experience(1994:682). The production of culture is never one-sided. The essential role of the audience is furtherexplicated by art historian Carol Duncan (1991,1995), who suggests that the museum both structuresand invites a performance whether or not the visitorsconsider themselves performers. This performativitymay be embodied in something as simple as an indi-vidual following a prescribed route—which is pre-cisely what visitors to the national museum do. Thereis little room to wander as the design rigidly deline-ates one's path through the NMAI's exhibition space,which is awkwardly nestled in the former UnitedStates Customs House. The museum, like most ritualsites, Duncan explains, "is carefully marked off andculturally designated as reserved for a special kind ofattention—in this case, contemplation and learning"(1995:11).

The West as AmericaIndian culture was presented in a revisionist light

by a group of non-Indian curators and academics inthe Smithsonian Museum of American Art's 1991exhibition, The West as America: Reinterpreting Imagesof the Frontier, 1820-1920. Its imagery was deeplyingrained in the American consciousness—Indians incanoes, frontiersmen on horseback, pioneer familiesat the dinner table. It was not the paintings but ratherthe means of interpreting them that set off a firestormof protest in the United States Congress. Lambastedfor its political correctness, the exhibition wasgrounded in a desire to expose the myths and ideolo-gies of Western expansion. The West as America in-curred such wrath because it exposed a darker side ofAmerican identity formation. The Smithsonian is per-ceived as a symbol of all that is great about America.For this very institution to present the ideology of theWest in a negative light was inconceivable.

The deconstructive rhetoric of The West as Americacame from the mouths and pens of white academics,and was interpreted as anti-American. Such self-re-flexivity was deemed "perverse and destructive" byhistorians like Daniel Boorstin and Charles Krautham-mer, who suggested that the tone of the exhibitionwas more in line with the strategies of Communistsubversives than members of a democratic society.There was much political capital to be acquired intrashing The West as America. As Bryan Wolf suggests,Senator Ted Stevens "scents blood in the air—not thepigmented kind from Leutze's painting Teocalli but thepolitical kind that produces howls and votes. His

attack on the Smithsonian's National Museum ofAmerican Art is but one movement in a larger effortto transform culture into a Svedge' issue" (1992:430).The same hue and cry has not emerged over theNational Museum of the American Indian. Why not?Is criticism tolerated only when the downtrodden areat the helm? Or has the NMAI resisted attack becauseof its current satellite location, far from the institu-tional fortress that is the Mall in Washington, D.C.?It will be quite interesting to see how the museumwill be received once ensconced in the nation's capi-tal.

ConclusionMuseums have traditionally advanced a nationalist

agenda, where they are represented as embodying allthat is great about a nation and its people. Such apolicy is exclusionary at best and dangerous atworst—as nationalism, Richard Sennett has written,"creates a mythic land in which people understandthemselves and each other. The myth disguises in-equalities and legitimates attacks on people whoselives are different" (1994). Ironically, the NMAI veersdangerously close to projecting a pan-Indian nation-alism. Representation in the national archive is afterall, universally desired—but can the colonized avoidthe adoption of the colonizer's paradigm? In its effortsto instill Indian pride, and to bring a greater under-standing and tolerance to the non-Indian public, themuseum more often than not glosses over tension anddifference. The exhibitions, as a visitor commented inthe NMAI's guest book, result in a " . . . homogeniza-tion of all cultures."

While a diversity of perspectives and opinions iskey to the success of cultural institutions, perhaps toomany people were involved in this instance, resultingin a rather unfocused pastiche of approaches. A1992report by the Assembly of First Nations and the Ca-nadian Museums Association after the Canadian ex-hibition The Spirit Sings, called for every futuremuseum representation of First Peoples to be theproduct of an equal collaboration between aboriginaland non-aboriginal peoples. Phillips sees this as a signthat the colonial era of the museum is drawing to aclose (1994:117). While this spirit of cooperation islaudable, the experience of the Creation's Journeyexhibit suggests that collaboration in and of itself isnot enough. Another recent Smithsonian venture, thedisplay of the Enola Gay, similarly demonstrates theextent to which the museum is a highly politicizedarena. Today, museums are acknowledged to be


ideology-producing entities in need of reform. Whilethis recognition has resulted in a rethinking ofmuseological practice, it has also made the museuman increasingly contested terrain. Every effort wasmade to make the display of the Enola Gay exhibitioncollaborative, but some groups are simply louder andin possession of greater political capital. In a stepbackwards, caving to pressure from Congress andpowerful veteran's groups, the Smithsonian made thedecision to display the Enola Gay as a Hegelian objectof contemplation—all didactic explanation has beenexcised from the exhibition.

No one can argue with the value of celebrations ofcreativity and heritage, but for them to succeed someengagement with contemporary conflicts and realitiesis called for. As art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeauexplains, "insofar as critical practices do not exist ina vacuum, but derive their forms and meanings inrelation to their changing historical conditions, theproblem of definition must always be articulated interms of the present" (1988:206). The problem ofcultural representation is not so much a problem tobe solved but rather one in need of continual rework-ing and restrategizing. By unveiling the presence ofthe political, the economic, and the social within thecultural institution, museums such as the NMAI canfunction as a dialectical forum rather than as a cere-monial monument. •

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Molly Lee and Toby Miller for their sug-gestions and support.

Notes

1. Influenced by, among other things, continental theory(Foucault, Lyotard, Barthes, et al) and political activism,and applied to everything from architecture to academe,postmodernism is notoriously hard to define. Yet it canbe said that the various intellectual, artistic, and socialcurrents that have aligned themselves with the postmod-ern share the following: an awareness of language as anexplanatory mode, a concern with a critical deconstruc-tion of traditions, a desire to illuminate rather than denysocial and political affiliations, a wish to radically revisestructures of power and their corresponding culturalhierarchies, and a desire to recover the history of others.For a variety of cultural perspectives on postmodernism,see essays in the exhibition catalogue The Decade Show:Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s. Museum of Contem-porary Hispanic Art, the New Museum of ContemporaryArt, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, 1990.

2. This "educational" kit, put out by the J. Paul Getty

Museum, has everything needed to make your own mu-seum in miniature—stickers of great works of art fromCanaletto to African masks with gallery walls to stickthem on, cardboard cut-outs of museum guards, visitors;Classical statuary with gallery floors to display them on;geometric shapes for creating one's own abstract works,and a guidebook featuring the history of museums—allfor $29.95.

3. Susan Stewart (1993) suggests that the collection re-places history with classification and exists beyond therealm of temporality. Museological attempts to placeobjects in context are concerned not with historical rep-resentation but rather with inventing a classificatorysystem which will define time and space in such a waythat the world can be accounted for within the parame-ters of the collection.

4. Of this new partnership, artist Jimmie Durham cynicallysurmised, "Last summer the Smithsonian held a daylongmeeting in Albuquerque and 'heard from a number ofIndian and museum spokespersons representing manyviewpoints'. Surely those viewpoints have been collected,and just as surely they will be packaged and properlydisplayed" (Durham 1993).

5. Daniel Inouye cited in Geoffrey Platt, The RepatriationLaw Ends One Journey — But Opens a New Road,"Museum News (January/February 1991) 91.

6. At the time of this writing, Congress is set to vote on thedismantling of the National Endowment for the Arts,which will, of course, adversely affect the future of thisand all other cultural institutions.

7. I include myself here as a writer operating within whiteacademic discourse. I am not of Native ancestry nor doI presume to speak for (or against) Native Americans.My intent here is a critique of museological practice andnot of Native culture.

8. I met informally with members of the curatorial staff atthe NMAI's storage facility in the Bronx in April 1995.

9. Label text cited in the exhibition catalogue, The Museum:Mixed Metaphors. For a comprehensive account of mu-seum "interventions'1 like Wilson's see Corrin 1994-

10. A show devoted to the use of humor in Native art washeld at the Center for the Arts/Yerba Buena Gardens inSan Francisco this summer. In the accompanying cata-logue, Indian Humor, Jolene Rickard writes, "What'sworth a laugh is that someone out there will inevitablydig this piece because it was made by an Indian"(1995:12).

11. Most museums displaying non-Euro/American artisticproductions have tended to ignore contemporary reali-ties. Efforts to bring primitivized cultures into the presentare a recent phenomenon. See the exhibition cataloguefor Fred Wilson's reinstallation of the Seattle Art Mu-seum's collection, The Museum: Mixed Metaphors,1992.

12. This was Mr. Haozous' response to the question of whatissues are facing contemporary Native artists in IndianArtist 1:1 (1995)

13. Amy Gamerman, in her review of the NMAI for The WallStreet Journal suggested that the museum's curators"would do well to study" the upstairs shop where itemswere "more respectfully displayed than the museum'sown artifacts: Grouped by tribal affiliation and medium,they are in well-lit cases with cards listing only the artist'sname and nation" (1994:A16).

14. For a cultural analysis of these spectacles, see Ross 1994and Myers 1994.


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ALLISON ARIEFF is a doctoral candidate in theAmerican Studies Program at New York University.

Documents

A Different Sort of (P)Reservation: Some Thoughts on the ...rfrank/class_web/ES-114A/Week 5...around a drum" (1995:112). The NMAI was given the mandate to develop a public museum devoted