A Legacy Reclaimed

When multimillion-dollar artworks are moved from one museum to another, security becomes the highest priority. An example is 1997’s move of the art treasures from the Getty Museum’s Italian villa in Malibu to the new Getty Center in Brentwood; both the timing and method of transfer remained under tight wraps while in process.

Across the country, another priceless museum collection is now being relocated from an old facility to a new one. But in this case, the care and handling of the artworks demands a whole new set of rules.

These art objects require not only security guards, but also the blessings of tribal elders as the works move into their new home. As they arrive at the loading dock in 18-wheel trucks, objects must be welcomed to their new residence with a “smudging” ceremony, in which cleansing smoke from burnt sweet grass or sage is wafted over the object with the wave of an eagle feather.

A new definition of “value” in art also is coming to this city’s federally funded museum scene, as “living objects” representing 10,000 years of Native American culture make their way from a cramped, aging New York City facility to the 10th--and final--Smithsonian Institution museum on the National Mall: the National Museum of the American Indian.

In the fall, ground was broken for the National Museum of the American Indian, but instead of the usual military brass bands, the ceremony took place to the steady beat of Indian drums. The moment was hailed as an end to a long trail of tears, a long-overdue acknowledgment of Native Americans in the heart of the nation’s capital.

Dedicated to preserving the culture of more than 1,000 Native American communities of the Western Hemisphere, the $110-million, 250,000-square-foot museum will be situated between the Capitol and the city’s busiest museum, the National Air and Space Museum, and across the Mall from the National Gallery of Art.

Slated to open in 2002, the museum will stand in marked contrast to the staid white columns of many surrounding national monuments. Flowing curves of cream-colored Kasota limestone mined in Minnesota will rise from the museum’s four-acre site like natural rock formations, nestled into a landscape of plants selected by a Native American ethnobotanist.

Serving as the entrance to the building will be a five-story dome called the Potomac designed to capture and reflect the light of the winter solstice, the equinox and the summer solstice.

“I always say that the Mall is full of Greeks and Romans,” says Johnpaul Jones of Jones & Jones architecture firm in Seattle. Jones is part of a core design team for the museum that includes ethnobotanist Donna House, a Navajo-Oneida raised in the Navajo tribe; interior designer Ramona Sakiestewa, a Hopi artist who lives in Santa Fe, N.M.; and Caddo-Cherokee design consultant Lou Weller.

*

The team was appointed in 1998, after the breakdown of the Smithsonian’s 1994 agreement with the architectural firm GBQC of Philadelphia and architect Douglas Cardinal of Ottawa, to provide a design for the building. Jones assumed Cardinal’s duties as overseer of the project--although he stresses that, in Native American tradition, the design is a collaborative effort, with a host of guides from many native nations collectively called “The Way of the People.”

House, who learned the spiritual and practical significance of plants from her elders, says: “We are working with indigenous plants, local flora, rather than bringing in exotic plants. We see each element of the environment as our relatives.

“When people come onto the land, they are going to be greeted by water and boulders--ancient boulders that are the ancient people of the Earth. This museum represents a past that hasn’t been in history books.”

The National Museum of the American Indian will become the third and most visible of three Smithsonian facilities of Native American history. The first is the George Gustav Heye Center of the National Museum of the American Indian, which opened in 1994 in the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Customs House, built in 1907, in Lower Manhattan.

The second is the Cultural Resources Center, a research, conservation and support facility opened in 1999 in Suitland, Md., a suburb of Washington. Though different from the planned museum on the Mall, the architecture of the Suitland facility also mirrors nature. Its radial steel and copper roof is abstractly derived from culturally significant organic forms, including pine cones, seashells and spider webs.

Its building was designed to meet the special needs of the objects inside; it features a three-story ceiling to accommodate oversized objects including totem poles and canoes. Instead of metal doors, some storage spaces are covered with muslin, to allow objects inside to “breathe.”

W. Richard West Jr., director of the museum and a Cheyenne, adds that some objects here must remain available for ceremonial use, often by elderly Indians. “We sometimes allow an individual to be alone with an object,” he says. “Yes, it raises a security issue, but it has to happen.” During a recent tour of the Cultural Resources Center, West takes a visitor into a glass-walled area with a fire pit in the middle. In the pit are ashes from the sage burnt in a recent ceremony.

Although the National Museum of the American Indian will not open its doors for two years, some objects from the New York museum’s cache of 1 million artifacts have already been transferred or are in the process of making the move to the Cultural Resources Center.

Objects of the most popular interest will eventually go to the new museum on the Mall, expected to draw 5 million to 7 million visitors per year. Some items will remain on display at the Heye Center in New York.

Representing Native American communities of the Western Hemisphere from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego, the Heye collection includes wood, horn and stone carvings from the Northwest Coast of North America; Navajo weavings and blankets; textiles from Peru and Mexico; Southwestern basketry; gold work from Colombia, Mexico and Peru; jade from the Olmec and Maya civilizations; Aztec mosaics; and painted hides and garments from the North American Plains Indians.

Although the museum will encompass South American and Central American groups, it will differ somewhat from other institutions’ focus on Spanish influences in those cultures.

“In South America, there is a large Mestizo group; if you are speaking racially or ethnically, they are people who have Indian blood,” West says. “But culturally, they don’t consider themselves ‘indigenous’--they are more allied with Spanish culture.

“But there are thousands, millions of people in South and Central America who are indigenous, who speak the indigenous languages [rather than Spanish], who live by the traditions their forebears did.”

Duane King, director of L.A.’s Southwest Museum, served as assistant director for the Heye Center in New York from 1990 to 1995. He calls the Heye collection a “national treasure” and believes the Washington museum will enhance interest in the Los Angeles museum.

“In many ways, the Southwest Museum is the West Coast equivalent of the National Museum of the American Indian,” King says. “We also have Hispanic material and early California material, but the strength of the collection is our Native American material. We have things that they don’t have, and obviously they have things that we don’t have, but we are similar and complementary at the same time.”

*

The National Museum of the American Indian represents the latest chapter in an effort to preserve Native American history that started with Heye (1874-1957), a second-generation German American and heir to an oil fortune.

As a young man working as an engineer on a railroad project in Kingman, Ariz., Heye purchased a buckskin shirt from an Indian laborer’s wife--and began a lifelong obsession with collecting. His personal collection formed the basis for the Heye Center in New York, one of the largest such collections in the world.

West acknowledges that some Native Americans may resent Heye’s scavenging of so many objects from their native communities. Still, he says most of the many Native Americans serving as advisors to the museum are thankful to find significant items of their heritage accessible and available at a museum.

“In fairness to Heye, he was representative of his particular era of collecting, and I think it was an era when everybody assumed that Native Americans would cease to exist, simply die out,” West says. “It was sort of a cultural salvage operation.”

Like other Native American collections, this one is subject to repatriation laws that came into effect a decade ago, requiring that some materials, particularly those of religious significance, be returned to the tribes or groups that originally owned them. While the collection has lost a few items to repatriation, West says the net result has been positive.

“The laws exist to put material back . . . that probably shouldn’t have been here in the first place,” West says. “Human remains, I think, as a matter of human decency, should not be sitting in a museum collection.

“I would also point out that there are definite upsides to repatriation,” he adds. “When tribes have visited here to look at certain objects that might be subject to repatriation, they also have told us immense amounts about objects that will never be subject to repatriation. It has vastly increased our knowledge of our own very vast collection, and led to collaborations with native groups and native people that have nothing to do with repatriation.”

*

In 1980, discussions began between the Smithsonian and the Heye Foundation about a possible affiliation with the Smithsonian. In 1989, after years of negotiations, then-President George Bush signed legislation establishing the National Museum of the American Indian as part of the Smithsonian.

Legislation establishing the museum calls for the Smithsonian to raise one-third of the $110-million construction costs, with the other two-thirds funded by an appropriation by Congress. To date, slightly more than $60 million has been raised for new museum construction and other needs. Between 20% and 30% has come from Native American sources--including a lead gift of $10 million from the Pequot nation, made possible by Indian gaming.

The choice to use the term “American Indian” instead of “Native American” in the museum’s name was mandated by Congress, but West says that there is nothing politically incorrect about the phrase “American Indian.”

“The shortcoming of the name is that ‘American Indian’ refers mostly to the United States,” West said. “There is nothing pejorative about it; it is just regional and limited.

“But as long as we function as a museum of the entire Western Hemisphere, I don’t worry about what we are actually called.”