O.C. Curator Helps Launch Museum in D.C.

The preservation of certain American Indian artifacts can require greater care and feeding--literally--than the typical inanimate historical relic.

For instance, a 100-year-old Hopi kachina mask owned by Bowers Museum must not only be stored in a cool, dry place and kept from overexposure to light, but, because Hopis consider the mask to be alive, “To keep it healthy . . . I need to put a little corn in with it every once in a while,” said Paul Apodaca, the Bowers Museum’s Native American art curator.

“It doesn’t eat much,” he added with a laugh.

That kind of specialized care is one reason that Apodaca and about 30 other authorities on American Indian culture are laying the groundwork for the National Museum of the American Indian, an ambitious project of the Smithsonian Institution.

Scheduled to open in Washington in the year 2000, the new museum will house one of the country’s largest collections of art and artifacts of native peoples from North, Central and South America. Objects to be included will range from Sitting Bull’s drum to Colombian gold work and Peruvian textiles, dating from prehistoric to contemporary times.

In some ways, this institution will reach beyond the scope of the traditional museum. It is being designed to “become a collaborating partner with the Indian community in sustaining their brilliant culture” and to expunge the idea that the American Indian race is disappearing, said W. Richard West Jr., a Cheyenne and the founding director of the national museum.

“We have been here for thousands of years,” West said by phone from Washington. “We are here today under admittedly less-than-ideal conditions, but we are here, and planning for the future (utilizing) cultural values that have sustained us through the ages. . . . We are not vanishing.”

Apodaca, whose father is Navajo and mother is Mexican, envisions the institution as a way to help resolve the historic conflict that began when foreign settlers first clashed with Americans Indians, he said during a recent interview at his Bowers office.

“It will help resolve the conflict . . . by helping Indian tribes that have survived continue to survive and helping all people who have been affected by American Indians to have a better understanding . . . of our contributions.”

The establishment of national museum springs from 1989 legislation that tied its creation to the return of Indian remains and artifacts to a tribe or individual who can show a cultural affiliation. (A long, bitter battle between American Indians and the federal government over repatriation had been a serious impediment to the museum’s creation.)

At its core will be George Gustav Heye’s priceless collection of more than 1 million artifacts and 86,000 photographs, now housed in New York City. Heye, who died in 1957, was a New York banker who amassed the items over half a century while traveling throughout North and South America.

“The Heye collection has some unique objects” that many American Indians have never seen, Apodaca said. The chance to study these items will be “like getting a glimpse of a Bible you’ve never seen or an earlier edition of the Torah you’ve never read.”

The Smithsonian acquired the collection last year and has developed a three-part plan to store, study and display it. The preliminary price tag: $175 million.

The plan calls for the bulk of the items to be housed at a study and conservation facility in Suitland, Md., to open in 1997, and part to be kept in an exhibit and education center in New York City, to open in 1993. The project’s centerpiece, however, will be the new, 300,000-square-foot museum on the National Mall in Washington, featuring changing exhibits culled from the Heye and other collections.

Apodaca, an Orange County resident since he was 5, has no college degree. The 40-year-old curator with long, flowing black hair said he gained his expertise largely through a “lifetime involvement” with American Indians that began when he learned beading, basket making and music as a child. He also has done research on reservations in California and the Southwest.

He started at Bowers in 1980, and for five years ran an education program called Arts of Native America as an artist-in-residence (he still does sand paintings, mostly, when time permits). Then he was named folk art curator, doing basically what he does now under a new title. He also teaches American Indian courses at Chapman University and sits on the California Arts Council’s Multi-Cultural Advisory Committee.

Apodaca, who advised the national museum on conservation, administration and other subjects, said that consultants to the project--many of whom are Indians--are helping to bring about a “21st-Century concept in museums.”

Museums typically restrict access to large chunks of their collections to curators or other highly trained researchers.

But, Apodaca said, “we’re talking about creating new policies that would allow visiting tribal elders and artists and medicine people to see (the collections) and study them and tell us things we don’t know about them, or maybe to remind themselves of things they are starting to forget.”

Along these lines, an on-site residence might be apt, as certain artifacts must be used in two- or three-day ceremonies that keep the objects “active” and sustain critical relationships between relics and tribes, Apodaca said.

Planners also have discussed unconventional facilities to accommodate other special needs, such as providing nourishment for kachina masks or cleansing other objects spiritually with smoke from burning sage.

Providing greater access would mean more than just having wide-open storage rooms, Apodaca said. “We’re saying that the museum is an extension of the American Indian community” and are considering a computer network that would link the facility with reservations, study centers and museums nationwide.

“That way people in Alaska could gain access to (information about) Eskimo artifacts in D.C.” or unidentified items in Washington could quickly be identified by computer communication with a tribe in Palm Springs, he said.

Apodaca has proposed that Bowers, scheduled to reopen in October, 1992, after its renovation and expansion is complete, be included in the computer network. More than 12,000 American Indians representing 91 tribes live in Orange County, and about one-third of the Santa Ana museum’s 70,000-piece collection consists of American Indian artifacts, Apodaca said.

The national museum is to occupy the National Mall’s last open space, across from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, near the Capitol.

“This is the last museum to be built on the Mall in D.C., and it’s going to be about the first people who were ever here,” Apodaca said. “The alpha and omega of that is really exciting, and to be involved in the creation of the National Museum of the American Indian is just amazing to me.”