2006 OAH Convention Supplement

Newcomers to the National Mall: The National Museum of the American Indian

Mark Hirsch

Haho! (Ho-Chunk word meaning "welcome!")

The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) welcomes the members of the Organization of American Historians and the National Council on Public History to Washington, D.C. There is much to see at the NMAI, and much for historians to engage with. This note highlights areas of the museum that may be of special interest to historians, and provides background information that may help explain what you see during your visit.

History

The NMAI is a major exhibition space for Indian art and material culture as well as a center for educational activities, ceremonies, performances, and Native community outreach. The new museum opened on the National Mall on September 21, 2004. Since then, more than 2.9 million visitors have experienced the museum's exhibitions, programs, films, educational presentations, and publications.

The NMAI derives from the former Museum of the American Indian, which was opened in New York City in 1922 by George Gustav Heye, a wealthy collector of American Indian material culture. Heye began collecting in the Southwest in 1896. By the 1950s, he had amassed a collection of more than 800,000 artifacts and 100,000 photographs documenting indigenous peoples from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic. Heye exhibited some of these materials at his museum at 155^th Street and Broadway, and stored the balance in a warehouse in the Bronx. Following his death in 1957, the museum struggled, but trustees and others took steps to assure its survival. In 1989, the Museum of the American Indian became part of the Smithsonian Institution by an Act of Congress.

A Native Place

NMAI's mission statement, adopted in 1990, announced that the new museum would not just be about Native peoples, but would consult, collaborate, and cooperate with Native peoples in all aspects of the museum's planning and work. Ultimately, the museum's design and exhibitions were shaped by these close and ongoing relationships with Native peoples.

During early conversations about the museum's design, indigenous people expressed a desire for a welcoming building open to the sky, warm in color and tone, and facing the east, an orientation toward the rising sun being important to many Native people. As a result, visitors today proceed through a carefully designed landscape of water elements, plants and trees, "grandfather" rocks, honoring spaces, and sites for outdoor presentations. Distinctive stones mark the cardinal directions. From a circular welcome plaza, visitors enter to encounter a grand space called the Potomac (from an Algonquian word meaning "where the goods are brought"). Prisms refract sunlight around the Potomac's walls and domed atrium, and extensive ranges of windows allow views of external water elements, the Mall, and the nearby Capitol.

Exhibitions

Collaboration with Native peoples also shaped the development of the museum's inaugural exhibitions. The museum invited twenty-four different Native communities throughout the hemisphere to develop their specific installations in the three permanent galleries: Our Universes (Native worldviews and philosophies), Our Peoples (Native histories), and Our Lives (Native people today). Each community chose the objects to be shown, and determined what should be said about them. NMAI staff contributed a thematic spine for each of the three permanent exhibitions. The resulting galleries privilege Native voices and present a wide variety of contemporary Native perspectives on philosophy, identity, and history. A rotating installation, "Windows on Collections," presents the breadth of the NMAI's collections.

Of all the museum's exhibitions, Our Peoples: Giving Voice to Our Histories is likely to hold the greatest appeal for historians. In the exhibition, visitors are invited to question, What is history and who writes it? as they look at the last five centuries from the vantage point of eight groups of American Indians. The installation suggests that, since contact, nearly every Native community wrestled with the impact of deadly new diseases and weaponry, the weakening of traditional spirituality, and the seizure of homelands by invading governments. That said, visitors are encouraged to view indigenous history, not as a story of destruction, but as a story of survival—a story in which Native peoples intentionally and strategically kept their cultures alive.

The Future

Since opening, the NMAI has entered a period of evaluation. Our key challenge is determining how best to address our visitors' interests and concerns. Some visitors wished for a timeline approach to history, or more of a focus on well-known events. Others expressed a desire for more displays of collections in an art historical context.

The NMAI is a new museum, a work in progress. That is why we would like to invite our friends in the Organization of the American Historians and the National Council on Public History to help us chart our course. We hope you will visit the museum during your stay, and invite you to share your comments with us so that we may better serve our visitors, Native and non-Native alike.

The convention provides multiple opportunities to visit the NMAI and to engage issues related to its mission. Friday morning, conventioneers may tour the museum's Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Maryland, and that afternoon may attend two offsite sessions at the museum itself. On Wednesday evening, Richard West of the NMAI participates in a plenary on American history at the Smithsonian Institution, and a state-of-the field session on race, ethnicity and museums includes attention to the NMAI. For further information, consult the convention program. 

NMAI's hours and location: 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily, closed December 25. Located on the National Mall between the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum and the U.S. Capitol Building at 4th Street and Independence Avenue, S.W., Washington, D.C. For information call 202-633-1000 or visit our website at <http://www.AmericanIndian.si.edu>.