A Bridge Between Two Worlds : Culture: As head of the new National Museum of the American Indian, Rick West aims to dispel the stereotype of his people as noble savages.

Sitting prim and proper in the shadow of Smithsonian Castle, it’s hard to picture W. Richard West in the full tribal regalia of his Cheyenne tradition: paint strewn across his cheeks, eagle feathers in his coffee-brown hair, buckskins and moccasins in place of his current pin-stripes and penny loafers.

Rick West has traveled a long way from his family’s log cabin to reach this sun-soaked day, looking out through the bay windows of his Washington Mall office--contemplating the first full day of his daunting new Dream Job.

“Quite frankly,” says West, smiling and exuding an air of gentle confidence, “I can’t think of any job I would want more.”

This month, the 47-year-old Indian rights lawyer begins work as the newly crowned director of the National Museum of the American Indian. It is an ambitious $106-million-plus project to be built on the choicest of D.C. real estate, next door to the Capitol and the Air and Space Museum.

For West, a member of Oklahoma’s Cheyenne tribe, this museum sends the overdue but welcome signal that American Indians are finally being recognized, he says, “as a complicated, rich culture that deserves a prominent place on the Mall”--more than a century after white settlers began herding Indians onto reservations.

“Congress, in doing this, is not motivated simply by guilt,” he says, “although, you know, guilt is fully warranted.”

A Stanford Law School graduate and a veteran Washington lobbyist, West appears more accustomed to the power lunch than the peace pipe, but family and friends say his roots in the Indian way of life run deep.

Cate Stetson, the only non-Indian partner in West’s former Albuquerque, N.M., law firm notes with admiration: “I have to deal with two worlds, but I don’t have to live in both of them. It’s a tribute to Rick that he pulls it off so well.”

West himself puts it this way: “Contemporary Indians realize we live in two worlds, and that we have to be equipped to deal with both worlds. But what gets us through both worlds is that we are thoroughly grounded in our own culture.”

It has, in fact, been his lifelong mission to preserve and promote that culture--a fact not lost on Smithsonian Secretary Robert McC. Adams, who in announcing West’s selection last month praised his “commitment to a deeper understanding of the meaning of American Indian life and culture.”

West spent his early years on a Cheyenne reservation in eastern Oklahoma, in what he describes as a relatively privileged and cultured household amid poverty.

His Cheyenne father, Walter Richard West, was on his way to becoming an acclaimed artist, and his white mother, Maribelle McCrea, was a pianist and music professor at Bacone College, a local mission school established in the 1880s by Baptists, primarily to serve the Cheyenne.

The family--including his younger brother, Jim--lived in a four-room cabin at a time when most of West’s peers still lived in tepees. “The students used to come over to our place to learn about what it was like, living in a house,” West says.

The Cheyenne children were schooled in mainstream American faiths and ways, as the missionaries pursued policies of what West characterizes as “wanton assimilation.” West’s 77-year-old father is a Catholic; he is a Methodist.

“The reason I cannot speak my native language, Cheyenne, is because my father could not,” West says. “They were not allowed to speak Cheyenne. The nuns quite literally banged the children’s heads against blackboards who were caught speaking Cheyenne.”

At age 11, Rick West and his father took a “special pilgrimage” to Manhattan to see the Heye Foundation collection of Indian art and artifacts. That journey, four days each way by train, proved to be a watershed.

“I have such vivid memories of that trip,” West recalls. “Looking up at all this beautifully designed, authentic Indian handcraft--it opened my eyes. Some of the ornamented clothing, in particular, had very beautiful beadwork, the likes of which I’ve never seen since. Very beautiful.”

Not coincidentally, the Heye’s 1-million-piece collection will form the backbone of the planned Indian museum. Most of it will be moved from Manhattan to the new museum’s archives and 250,000-square-foot display areas, though an exhibit will be retained in New York on a floor of the former Customs House near Wall Street.

“Rick has had an interest in Indian culture from the time we were very young and war-danced together,” says Jim West, Rick’s only sibling, who at age 44 is a private financial consultant to more than 150 tribes.

The key to Rick West’s success, his brother says, is his character. “By virtue of his mixed heritage . . . (he) knows how to build bridges.”

Adds Stetson: “It’s very, very difficult to say anything bad about Rick because he just leaves no room for it. The rest of us have some particularly glaring faults, but Rick has none--and we know him real well.”

“If he’s got a weakness, it’s that he’s got almost got no ability to be mean,” asserts West’s longtime law partner and friend in Albuquerque, Kevin Gower. “Rather than confront and fight and stir up tension and bad feelings, he’s willing to walk away and say life is too short. He thinks you win more that way . . . by softening the views of others rather than beating them over the head.”

West does bridle in his own way, though--a raised brow here, a chopping hand gesture there--at the prospect of seeing the Indian way of life assimilated out of existence.

He chides the media for largely ignoring the Indian community, preferring to traffic in romanticized and derogatory caricature, a la James Fenimore Cooper’s noble savage. He asserts that museums, including the Smithsonian, tend to treat Indians as if they were dinosaurs, a mere collection of models and bones.

The idea for the American Indian museum was forged in a hostile environment. Indian groups for years had protested the Smithsonian’s holding of Indian remains and burial artifacts in its massive archives.

The 1989 legislation that authorized the Indian museum’s creation--subject to a $36-million private fund-raising drive that West will head--also mandated the repatriation and proper burial of those remains.

“It’s about time,” West says. “The circumstances under which many of these remains were collected--and ended up in the Smithsonian collection--are very offensive. Some of the remains actually came from battlefields where soldiers gathered up the bodies and shipped them off to Washington. Quite frankly, that’s a terrible, inhuman way for our ancestors to be treated.”

He notes his own traditional Cheyenne belief that “unless a body has been properly buried, its spirit really never starts on the journey up the Milky Way to the hereafter, and simply wanders around lost in the village where it died.

“For us, it is important that the remains be returned so the spirits can be liberated.”

The “living” museum West envisions will be “part history, part sociology--a slice of Indian life, past and present.” He expects that its emphasis on modern community and culture as much as its history will embolden the Indian community.

Indian leaders-- who have criticized the Smithsonian in the past as a staid, ethnocentric institution--praise West’s appointment.

Notes Gower: “I’ve seen simplistic exhibits (at the Smithsonian) suffering from a cultural myopia. Words like primitive and savage are used in a denigrating way. It’s nice that, for the first time, an Indian is going to have a central say about how Indians will be portrayed in the nation’s most prominent place.”

To that end, West is planning exhibits that will highlight current political controversies besetting the Indian way of life: violent feuding among Mohawks over gambling on their New York reservation; the South Dakotan Sioux’s battle for U.S. reparations over broken treaties and stolen land; the Amazon natives’ persecution by developers.

“I want it to be hemispheric in scope,” West says. “The diversity and beauty of Native American culture don’t stop at the U.S. border.”

The philosophical and intellectual continuity of Indians, too, will be showcased, he says, noting that some Indian values are “supremely relevant” and gaining credence in the non-Indian world.

“Take what really is one of the driving values of Indian cultural life--that the land is not ours to buy and sell, to be bartered away,” he says. “Now that sense of balance between us and nature, it can be easily romanticized. . . .

“But the concept has a lot of relevance. After all, what has the Juggernaut of technology done? It’s gotten us polluted air, fouled water, et cetera,” he says. “You’re seeing attention being paid now to values that are inherently Indian.”

West attended the University of Redlands--where he was a student leader--as an undergraduate, earned a master’s degree in American history at Harvard and graduated from Stanford Law School in 1971. He won collegiate honors in legal writing and served as a clerk for a federal appellate judge. In 1979, he became the first Indian partner in the Washington office of the powerful New York law firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobsen.

As an associate, West took a leave of absence in 1977 to teach Indian law at Stanford and to help direct the American Indian Lawyer Training Program in Oakland. He returned to the firm in 1978, but after nine more years in Washington lobbying for Indian interests, in and out of court, his firm phased out its Indian accounts, West says, in favor of more profitable clientele.

He had a choice: Take up corporate law full time, or leave his hard-fought partnership.

In 1988, West uprooted his family for Albuquerque, to become a partner in what soon became Gover, Stetson, Williams & West, a firm whose attorneys devote their time exclusively to tribal affairs. It is the nation’s largest American Indian-owned law firm.

He played an integral role in the firm, becoming its president this year.

This made the news that West would leave, effective June 1, to take the $115,000-a-year Smithsonian job bittersweet for his colleagues.

“It’s terrible,” says co-worker Stetson, only partly in jest. “The news came as a big thump in my heart. . . . With Rick leaving, I’d feel sick if I didn’t feel so proud.”

For the next year or two, West plans to commute on weekends from Washington to New Mexico. His wife, Mary Beth--who attended Stanford Law School with Rick and today is an expert in international law--is obliged to stay a year as a law professor at New Mexico State University. His 15-year-old daughter, Amy, is vehement about finishing high school in Albuquerque.

As for his 12-year-old son, Ben: “He hasn’t got a choice. He’s coming out here,” West says, punctuating the remark with a chuckle and a shake of the head.

“Oh, this isn’t going to be an easy move. This is a permanent career change, though. . . . It will be the better part of a decade before this museum is even up.”

And of that expected opening day in 1998, what happens then?

West turns away from his desk to gaze out the windows of his office.

“Americans,” he says deliberately, granting each word its own emphasis, “will see the richness and diversity of historical and contemporary Indian life--as they have never seen it before. It won’t come overnight. But we’ll do it.”