Native American History

The Heye collection of American Indian artifacts goes back to 1896 when George Heye acquired a Navajo buckskin shirt while on an engineering job in Arizona. Today, the Heye collection is one of the world’s best dealing with the aboriginal peoples of North, Central and South America. It contains more than 1 million artifacts, 40,000 books and 86,000 photo negatives and prints. For years, the collection has been deteriorating in a little-visited facility in the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Before long, however, the bulk of the collection will be housed in a new museum of the Smithsonian Institution devoted to the American Indian. Congress has passed legislation providing for construction of a $106-million building on the mall next to the Air and Space Museum and across from the National Gallery of Art. The legislation, expected to be signed by President Bush next week, also provides for a $25-million satellite museum in the federal Customs House in New York City to meet terms of the Heye Foundation trust that the collection remain in New York.

That stipulation had snagged the transfer of the collection to the Smithsonian for years. But Julie Kidd, chairwoman of the Museum of the American Indian said, “It is a glorious solution.”

At last, American natives will be properly honored and represented within the nation’s premier collection of museums. When the facility is operating, perhaps Smithsonian officials will consider frequent exhibitions in the West, where the Indian played such an important, and not fully appreciated, role in American culture and history.