Strains of the Old and the New: the NMAI in DC

The above panel is displayed in the entryway to the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington DC. From this first indication, the visitor realizes that the museum will point to a more holistic understanding of culture. I've read a bit of the criticism and controversy about the museum, from the embarrassing displays of racism and blatant ignorance, to concerns about the museum's claim to representing indigenous cultures of an entire hemisphere, a rather extensive mandate. The museum has symbolic significance with its location on the National Mall, which is of paramount importance to long marginalized Native cultures.


From the more traditional displays of beadwork to explanations of hybridized celebrations like Dia de Los Muertos, the museum's display and structure begins on the fourth floor after visitors enter through a cavernous lobby that is structurally beautiful, with concentric circles on the ceiling - it's reminiscent of the Guggenheim. I was directed to start on the 4th floor and work my way down. The fourth floor contains the "Our Universes" and "Our Peoples" exhibitions. These focus on the living cultures in the Western hemisphere today.



The displays are structured to highlight the contributions of community curators, including portraits and video, and focusing on individual tribes. The overall result is that visitors understand that Native Americans are diverse, with different languages and traditions in various tribes that live in many parts of the hemisphere, and that they are alive today. Notably, many of the portraits and videos feature Native Americans wearing everyday clothes - the museum does not give the visitor easy, Orientalizing pictures of Native Americans wearing beads and headdresses and other visual clues that blur temporal boundaries, allowing Native Americans to be isolated and held in the past and prevented from being contemporary. Simultaneously, the museum does present historical traditions and artifacts from native communities' history, attempting to show Native Americans as contemporary contributors drawing from centuries of history, community, and artistic traditions.


The displays are beautiful and sleek, and I found the view from reverse equally beautiful, with the shadows of the objects shining through the linen screens and the glass in geometric constellations. Representation is always through a glass, darkly.

Displays of objects are shown with seeming binaries: guns (instruments of dispossession and resistance), bibles (dispossession and resilience) and treaties (dispossession and survival) are shown as both instruments employed against Native Americans in the Americas, but also utilized by Native Americans creatively and aggressively in their own right. These dichotomies are not proposed as strict binaries that are unresolvable, but to show the complex social results of acts meant to affect certain consequences but indubitably and inevitably caused others. This graceful and simultaneous duality reminds me of the work of Saba Mahmood, who argues in The Politics of Piety that resistance is not the only form of agency. Her critical intervention here is to give voice, agency, and nuance to the complexities of individual acts in a postcolonial setting. We must be aware that the story is never just one or two sides, but multiple, and look for the nuances of intersecting realities and potentialities.



A community will always make something their own, including these Bibles which were translated into many languages and decorated according to individual bands' aesthetic traditions. The arrowheads displayed (see below) were also arranged in a visually interesting and challenging way - rather than being seen as implements of death and destruction, they are arranged in curving waves to resemble the ocean. Taken from afar, they look like swarms of birds, swirling eddies of water, or Hokusai's The Wave. We are pushed to see familiar objects in new contexts that uncover their beauty.




On the third floor, the exhibition "Our Lives" included several alcoves examining the lives and recent histories of several specific tribes. This included the Yakama Nation in Washington, to which my cousin Arthur belongs.



The museum thus far had focused on quotidian objects from the histories of several bands, as well as representative artifacts from the history of European intervention and colonization of the Americas. Now, with this theoretical grounding, I continued in to the contemporary art exhibition. The exhibition "Vantage Point" showcases the museum's acquisitions of contemporary Native American art. I particularly enjoyed Marie Watt's In the Garden (Corn, Beans, Squash), a warm pink patchwork of wool pieces in geometric shapes tumbling through the center of the piece. I enjoy art incorporating textiles, such as the work of Ghada Amer. Lorenzo Clayton's Richard's 3rd Hand #16 also caught my eye with his deft usage of muted earth tones and the piece's incorporation of furniture. Nadia Myre's series Indian Act blends text with craft, using white beads to replace letters on a page of text, choosing to highlight the smallness of these letters by surrounding the white beads with red. This color inversion too is striking - white beads in a red background, covering or juxtaposed next to black letters on a white page.

The exhibition also included skate art, showing the deck with graffiti-like pop art. It struck me as a shame that this deck would face the ground and not be seen.

The exhibition "Up Where We Belong" focused on the little-lauded but often well-known contributions of Native Americans to popular music, from the blues (Mildred Bailey, Oscar Pettiford) to Link Wray, Redbone & Buffy Sainte-Marie. It was interesting to see the evolution of music in the United States, and have the contributions of Native Americans highlighted. This is another example of the museum's foregrounding of Native Americans' contemporary contributions.


As I walked back to the train station to return to NY, I noticed the inscription above Union Station. While I agree with the quotation's insight that traveling requires and inspires a certain knowledge, the first part of the comment shows the ubiquitous, treacherous nature of colonialism. It still, literally, shines down upon us, in our nation's capital - the behavior is inscribed in our monuments, watching over us on a daily basis. We are far from free of this dangerous mentality. Which is why the NMAI is necessary, the way it is. The institution shouldn't have to argue that Native Americans are still alive - shouldn't have to represent everyone. But for now, that's the reality, and the museums gracefully straddles its compromises.