Where's Tonto?

WHEN ONE ENTERS THE SPANKING new $199 million, 250,000-square-foot National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, the first objects encountered are two native watercraft. One is a 19-foot Hawaiian canoe of polished koa wood with an outrigger carpentered from the incomparably-named willi-willi tree. The other boat is a 10-foot Inuit kayak crafted from cedar and nylon cloth. Both objects are admirable in every way--perfect marriages of utility and art. Both speak eloquently of native artisanship and native seamanship, not to mention the courage and humility evoked by small boats on great waters.

They also raise a very large and fundamental question: What the hell do they have to do with the American Indian?

Which is pretty much the problematic dilemma of the newest museum on the National Mall. It is much less an institution dedicated to the comprehensive exploration of any instructive history and culture than it is a monument to the self-validation of all indigenous peoples in the Americas (and offshore). It is also a monument to the sort of academic and curatorial cowardice that washes these days through the hallways of the arts and social sciences. Evidence suggests the wearisome tide of political correctness may be ebbing--however slowly--on the nation's campuses, but the Indian museum demonstrates that it has yet to recede in the cultural institutions of the nation's capital. Indeed, we may have here something approaching a flood-prone basement that will never completely dry out.

That this should be so with the National Museum of the American Indian is especially regrettable. Unlike African Americans, for example, whose history and culture (however demeaned and oppressed) have been part of the United States and its colonial antecedents since the early 17th century, American Indians were not only here first, they had a rich and distinctly Western Hemisphere identity wholly separate from the Europeans who sailed here and pushed them west. They have been treated as separate nations from both our republic's earliest times and theirs, and they deserve their own museum, not just for their sake, but for that of the rest of us as well.

What more instructive light could we throw on this nation's journey to the present day than with a tough-minded museum that truly explores Native American history and culture and its astonishing resilience in the face of 400 years of land theft, genocidal warfare, racial bigotry, misplaced paternalism, and disease? Such a museum need not be a horror-catalogue guilt trip; it could be a triumphant story of survival, as well as a vital reminder of this republic's unfinished business. Because from the corn-planting tutelage of Squanto and Powhatan, to the unconquerable resistance of Osceola and the Seminoles to the science and cities of the Maya to the high-steel skyscraper work of New York's Mohawk ironworkers, Indians have taught us much of what it means to be American. We need to acquaint ourselves with those lessons. And so do they.

Alas, as now constituted, the National Museum of the American Indian appears to have no such agenda. The Catch-22 of its mission is that the vast bulk of archaeology, anthropology, and general scholarship on Native Americans has been done over the centuries by non-Indians. In the ethnic hypersensitivity of our touchy-feely era, clearly we can't acknowledge that. American Indians, like all minority groups these days, want to explain their own history, even if others may know more about it.

Therefore, what opened on the Mall last September is a huge and handsome (and mostly empty--just 40,000 of it's 250,000 square feet is exhibit space) building housing a small but bizarre collection of exhibits in which a few indigenous groups attempt to explain such things as how they ice fish in Manitoba or play bingo in Chicago or hunt deer in Virginia. In keeping with current educational theory, the museum eschews any coherent organizing principle such as chronology or "great men" in favor of "social history" and "ideas." But concepts are addressed in such a haphazard, scattershot fashion that they verge on the meaningless.

For example, an entire wall filled with firearms includes an M-16, and an AK-47 assault rifle, as well as an Israeli-made Uzi submachine gun. Just what, if anything, these have to do with American Indians is a mystery. An exhibit label informs us that government forces in 1932 killed 10,000 native people in El Salvador. That was at least 15 years before those automatic weapons were invented, but possibly the curators didn't know that. Visitors can see lots of peace pipes but no war bonnets, and will look in vain for any historical mention of the word "scalp."

Hundreds of stunning examples of pre-Columbian pottery--amulets, pots, plates, bowls, and figurines--are crowded together in a long gallery almost devoid of explanation, though with effort one can computer-game one's way to a bit more information. Considerably more individual attention is given to a pair of contemporary basketball sneakers adorned with red beads by a Kiowa artist in Oklahoma. The sneakers get their own display case.

One exhibit takes a most intriguing idea--the long and multiple use of Indian figures and scenes on colonial and U.S. money--and does almost nothing with it. Native Americans, we are told, were pictured on money as symbols of liberty. But why? And what about as symbols of strength and power? What about pride? What about the Romantic concept of the noble savage, which warred with racism in America's complicated treatment of its native people? And (dare we ask?) what about the Washington Redskins?

One could fill an entire gallery with exhibits exploring the contradictory images and stereotypes of the Native American in nonnative culture through the centuries, not to mention the comparable stereotypes and images Indians held of rival tribes. These are important not just as evidence of cultural condescension and bigotry, but because inevitably they influenced the way Indians came to see themselves.

The one-dimensional portrayal of Indians in Hollywood westerns, whether "good" Indians like Tonto or "bad" Indians like scalp-hungry warriors attacking wagon trains, created a vastly oversimplified image of Native Americans that endures worldwide to this day. The National Museum of the American Indian attempts to ignore this problem--Hollywood Indians are barely mentioned--but it's omnipresent in the brain of every visitor. You can almost feel its presence, like a giant buffalo in the lobby that everyone pretends isn't there.

There's another unacknowledged buffalo as well. One would think the National Museum of the American Indian would have something to say about the Taino people, the Indians who discovered Columbus. An extraordinary number of discoveries have been made in recent years in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba illuminating the intriguing culture of the Taino, who were enslaved and essentially wiped out by the Spaniards within 30 years of Columbus's arrival. I found one book on the Taino in the museum shop, but no other mention of this fascinating people, who left behind a wealth of pottery, ceremonial plazas, irrigation systems, and other cultural insignias throughout the Greater Antilles. Few today would suggest that the world of the American Indian began with the Taino-European contact. But that contact was inarguably the crucial hinge in Native American history. Isn't it simple intellectual cowardice not to mention it at all?

Or is the museum far more interested in the present than in the past? There is truly luscious art work at the museum. The two largest exhibits which opened the museum explore the modern art and sculpture of George Morrison and Allan Houser and the jewelry created by that Native American multitalent (and former U.S. senator) Ben Nighthorse Campbell. Much of this gorgeous material unquestionably deserves exhibit somewhere--maybe in the National Gallery of Art. But most of it has far more to do with art than it does with any artistic vision distinctive to American Indians, if indeed such a thing exists. Certainly a few such pieces deserve a place in the Indian museum as cultural representatives. But having placed this enormous building on the National Mall hard by the Capitol, shouldn't Smithsonian curators have devoted most of it to shedding new light on a contentious past? Is what we need most to learn about American Indians how they live today, or how the past has shaped that identity?

Likewise, the history and culture of native Hawaiians and the Inuit probably deserve representation somewhere in the museum, for they share with American Indians a history of dispossession and cultural erosion by nonnative forces. But their history of all that--not to mention its impact--is relatively small and recent in comparison to their overall history as peoples, to the history of American Indians, and to the overall history of this nation as well. Shouldn't Hawaiians and Inuits, therefore, occupy a proportionately smaller place in the museum?

These are arguable curatorial questions, and only a fool would suggest all the answers are easy ones. The essential dilemma of the museum, however, demands a solution. For a number of reasons, not a few of them political, the National Museum of the American Indian wants to be about Native American unity. But the most instructive, the most fascinating, the most historic truth about Native American peoples is, and was, their diversity. The peaceful Pueblo Indians, the warlike Iroquois, the transported Cherokee, and the salmon-fishing Chinook all have their own myths, their own histories, and their own inter-tribal relationships, many of them as fractious as their relationship with the U.S. government. At the time of Columbus there were something approaching 2,500 Indian tribes in the Americas, each with a distinct identity and character.

How does the Indian museum deal with this? It permits just 24 tribal groups, some of them quite small and idiosyncratic, to tell their own story in their own way, whether or not that story or that method of telling communicates much at all. And half of these--half!--aren't even from the United States.

The plan is to rotate the featured tribes in coming years, so that each will eventually get a chance to tell its own tale. Meanwhile, museum visitors miss any sense of the monumental and majestic multiplicity of the Native American past--the vastness of the cultural tapestry that peopled the Western Hemisphere when the first Europeans arrived.

Moreover, what stories and objects are exhibited, are presented almost devoid of any meaningful context--ethnographic, historical, geographic, or linguistic--and this is a point of contention with not a few anthropologists. Unlike the wealth of Native American materials at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History, most of which can be traced to a very specific time, place, and circumstance, the bulk of the Indian Museum's 800,000-item collection was assembled by a wealthy New Yorker named George Gustav Heye during the first part of the 20th century, often purchased from other collectors who knew little about the items they were selling. Furthermore, various tribes differ over which artifacts should be viewable by non-native peoples, so some highly instructive items aren't even on display.

For example, everybody knows that the most famous battle American Indians ever fought, they also won--that 1876 fracas on the Little Big Horn River involving Gen. George Armstrong Custer. Though the story of Custer's Last Stand has been told from Custer's point of view in hundreds of paintings, books, articles, and motion pictures ever since, there is also a little-known Indian version of the story. It is a multipage pictograph, a sort of Bayeux Tapestry, depicting the battle, drawn five years afterwards by a Sioux warrior named Red Horse based on his own memories of that day. Red Horse's pictograph is one of the many American Indian holdings of the National Museum of Natural History.

One might think that an item so vital to telling the Native American side of such a central day in their history would warrant display, or at least mention, in the National Museum of the American Indian, which could have easily borrowed or copied it for an exhibit. It's not there, apparently because none of the participating tribes requested its inclusion (if, indeed, they even know that it exists) and curators declined to push the issue.

Another curatorial dilemma rivals the evolution/creationism debate currently roiling some of the nation's schools. For both political and religious reasons, most Indians say their ancestors originated here in America on their own historical tribal lands. Informed by the presence in American Indians of Asian DNA, almost every scientist in the world believes Native American ancestors migrated to the Americas from Siberia across an Ice Age land bridge that then spanned the Bering Strait. How does the Indian Museum deal with that? It doesn't.

So what, in the end, are we to make of the National Museum of the American Indian? Well, at least it's visually a great building. What looked under construction like an Orwellian horror aborning has turned out to be one of the most interesting, welcoming, and eye-friendly museums on the Mall. Even without its amiable pond and boulder-studded landscaping, the bulging yellow structure with its rough Kasota limestone cladding seems more like a piece of geology than an intrusion on the landscape. It's as if a rocky bit of Yosemite or Monument Valley or Zion National Park had heaved itself out of the earth in front of the Capitol. Equally intriguing, it manages to be a splendid architectural neighbor, its rough rotundity in perfect counterpoint to the sleek angularity of the National Gallery of Art's East Wing, just across the Mall.

Inside, the Indian Museum's soaring 120-foot atrium with its concentric, skylit dome has been called an extravagance of empty space by a few critics. But if a sense of freedom and open space isn't at the heart of American Indian culture, what is?

Beyond the building itself, the brightest aspect of the museum may be its future. According to several people involved in bringing it to life, what we now see in the National Museum of the American Indian isn't necessarily what we're always going to get.

"What you have to understand," one of them said, "is that for both political and financial reasons, the Smithsonian wanted desperately to get all the Indian peoples on board for this museum project. They compromised plenty for the sake of that unity, but it worked. You can't know what the museum means to Native Americans all across the country. They take tremendous pride in it. They feel like at last they've arrived in American society, with a visible presence right there in front of the Capitol building."

Now that Native Americans feel at one with the institution, he said, scholars and curators will inevitably feel confident enough to address larger and more fundamental questions about American Indian history and identity.

"There's a lot of New Age woo-woo in the exhibits right now," one western tribal member explained recently. "It's been pushed by a lot of Indians raised in places like New York City, whose understanding of traditional Indian life, while sincere, is abstract at best." While not addressed directly in the exhibit, he says, "one of their big issues is the name of the Washington Redskins."

The National Museum of the American Indian, he suggested, is going to have to decide whether its primary mission is to serve as a psychic prop--not to say agitprop--for contemporary Native American identity, or to open an intellectually honest, vigorous, and challenging dialogue about the fascinating historical journey of the continent's first Americans. It is a decision in which all Americans, in the end, will have a stake.

Ken Ringle, longtime reporter and cultural critic for the Washington Post, writes from retirement.