Native Americans and Museums

I am holding corn seeds in my hands. Leaning up against glass cases with "Indian Artifacts" inside of them, I am drawn to the image of the corn stalk. This is a good place to stop and pause before we go one. I need to tall a story.

We have come to the museum as a group of individuals but I know we will leave as something more. This is the third trip I have planned, side trips we call them, and our theme for the day is Native Americans and Museums.

These are young people from suburban New York. Heather tells me candidly knowing on some innate level the political incorrectness of her statement, " The last time we studied Indians was in the second grade whenwe did the Thanksgiving story. Aren't they all dead?"

"Two million Americans claim Native American as their ethnic heritage."

I get a wide eyed stare back.

Jon chimes in, "Ok, it's not Dances with Wolves anymore and the only other words I associate aren't very nice."

"Go ahead," I ask, knowing what is coming next.

"Drunks and casinos." I expected as much but I have come to understand that so much of what my learners know is only from the media, from those movies, from Disney. No experience of their own, just that foggy expression that has great power but little ownership, "It's what I've heard."

I promise to give them an eye opening day. I hope by the end of the day that perhaps they won't believe that all Indians are dead or on their way to it. I like the challenge of offering them a way to change their point of view and question what they've heard.

The American Museum of Natural History is my favorite museum in the world because I was raised there. My dad was a curator, infamous for having designed the whale which is the centerpiece of the ocean life hall. My stories are here. His stories are still alive to me here. When I pass the cases, I know the names of the people who worked behind the scenes. I know what's on the fifth floor. I know that science is all personal. I know some of the museum's dirty little secrets.

Yet, I am here with people who came on a trip largely to hear those stories. I see the museum through their eyes. Erel asks, "Why do they have all of those dead animals in cases? They need to get more exciting or no one will come."

I try to explain the role museums played before television and the Discovery channel. Once upon a time each diorama was a catalyst for the imagination. It was a painting, a moment, a place from which to begin. Now it is a musty case with a glassy eyed animal. Times have changed.

We start the day in the butterfly exhibit. It is the museum's first interactive exhibit ever. We talk about the butterfly effect, the beating of one small pair of wings having the capacity to change the world. In a museum where animals are pinned in glass cases, it is an attractive idea

They are entranced. They are no longer sophisticated first year students at NYU and TCNJ. They are five again, hoping that the big blue butterfly with the soft wings will land on their outstretched palms. They live in difficult times where they have been told incessantly that they will inherit a world full of problems. Here, for one moment, held in Julie's cupped palms is the small beating wing of hope.

I have given them all scraps of poetry. When the day began I offered up a box of poems. Poems written on all kinds of paper. Poems folded up like a note from a friend, like a small seed. I had asked that over the course of the day they might feel inspired to share their poems with the group. All of the words were written by Native American poets. I want the young people to feel those words in their mouths, hear them in each other's voices. Have a seed to plant in their imaginations perhaps. These voices are not dead, I hoped they would say. In the end, they said much more.

The oldest corridor in the museum houses the "Birds of New York State" exhibit. My father told me that it was a provision of the museum's charter from the State of New York that the Birds of New York had to be a part of the museum. How the museum chose to exhibit the birds of New York was completely their own decision.

Stapled. Stapled to the walls of cases are rows and rows of eyeless starlings, sparrows and hawks. Row upon row of specimens. They are not worth the effort of true taxidermy which would make them look life-like. Instead they are stuffed with cotton up to the eyes and then stapled to the wall. I have prepared "study skins" before, working with seabirds in Quebec. At least ours came to us dead, these I imagine gave their lives to be part of "a collection." I am overwhelmed but I watch my young friends as they have gone from the beautiful butterflies in their hands to this room.

" I have a poem," Erel stops us halfway through the hall." Sometimes, in the shadowed night. I loose my wings and fly free of this cage …" She is reading to us from the words of Leonard Peltier. She does not know who he is, but she understands the feeling of imprisonment in a room where the birds are mute and gagged with ancient cotton. Somewhere she has made the connection and she has chosen to share the words of a man who has been imprisoned for longer than she has been alive. She does not know the stories of any of the birds in these cases. She has never heard of Leonard Peltier but in this moment she and her friends make a leap to understanding. They have gone past the point of education to be about the amassing of information. Here in a room of eyeless birds with stapled wings, they understand what it means to be labeled, put in a glass case, forgotten.

I begin to tell the story of Leonard Peltier as we move out of the hall past the more colorful birds of North America who are houses in dioramas with painted backdrops.

"Why have we never been taught this before?" Erel asks.

I hate being the one to shatter that innocent for them, but I also understand what Brett says later. "If we'd been taught to always ask the question of whose story we aren't hearing, then maybe we wouldn't waste so much time assuming that there's only one way of knowing anything. I hate that we were trained to fill in the blanks or believe in a right answer." Brett used to hang up anonymous posters in high school questioning the administrative policies. Brett almost didn't graduate high school because he wouldn't fulfill a math requirement. He excels at what Herbert Kohl has termed "Creative Maladjustment." Brett is one of the most gifted artists and thinkers I know.

I find Heather and Julie pressed up against a white wall in the primate hall.

"What are you doing?" I ask.

"Oh, we're trying to figure out what it must feel like to be pinned in a case."

"What do you think the description for you might say?" I ask.

Innocent enough question even though I know it will resonate. Standing among their primate kin, with stuffed orangutan's watching with glassy eyes, they debate the ways in which they feel their generation is being represented in the media as opposed to how they feel about being members of this particular generation. They come to no consensus, but it brings us to a good place to begin asking those kinds of questions.

I stop at the entrance to the hall of Eastern Plains and Woodland Indians. There is a two paragraph description in the hall. It concludes, in past tense, that Indians are a thing of the past – wiped out by disease and war. How would it feel to be Native American and read that, according to some dead curator, you do not exist? In an alcove lined with pea green cases illuminated by bright fluorescent lights I ask them to sit in a circle. They are tired and the cool marble floor feels good. I dig around in my pack and pull out a deerskin pouch with dried corn seeds in it. I can see the drawing of the corn stalk in the case behind Kyle and Julie. I hope it can hear through the glass in as much as I hoped the cotton-eyed birds with their stapled wings could hear Erel.

" I want to tell you the story of Selu, the Corn Mother and Kanati, the first man-"

I speak slowly, weaving the colors of the land, laughing at parts of the tale. More, I am watching them. Some have a seed in their mouths, bringing it to life. Others hold that seed in their hands as they had cupped butterflies with beating wings at the beginning of the day.

When I finish they are quiet.

Slowly they pull themselves off the floor and move into the hall.

"That was a beautiful story, " Jesse whispers to me as we move through the exhibit.

"Everything here has a story. We just need to find a way to hear them."

Kyle is struck by the colors of the exhibit. "So 50's." He is right. Visual Fiestaware. I ask them what they think about the writing in the exhibits, pointing out the fallacies in the portrayals. For reading I had sent them pieces from Joseph Marshall's Not All Indians Dance and Vine Deloria's Red Earth White Lies. Deloria's work could be a primer for walking through the exhibit since he addresses the Clovis points, the Bering Strait story, and what he calls the myth of the Pleistocene's Hit Men; Paleo-Indians who wasted giant land mammals by running them off cliffs. The Museum must have fully embraced that belief in a period where the governmental policy towards Native peoples was called Termination, because there are not one, but three different visuals depicting the Indians pushing herds of bison off of cliffs into giant bloody piles below.

We look at the mannequin faces which are designed to be backdrops for the colorful parade of "Native American Costumes." Erel is reminded of the eyeless stuffed birds. Jon notices that the vast majority of the exhibits emphasize warfare.

"How come Indians are supposed to be so peaceful when everything you see relates to war?"

"How many commercials do you see where teenagers are snowboarding listening to loud music while wearing baggy pants." I counter.

A few pause trying to make the connection.

"Who decides?"

We are in the back corner of the exhibit in front of a yellow case entitled "The Ghost Dance Phenomenon." A painted shirt decorated in red, white and blue stars interspersed with bright yellow suns hangs in the corner. It looks like any other outfit in the display of "costumes." The description is simple: The Ghost Dance phenomenon swept the Plains Indians in the late 1800s. It combined elements of mysticism and Christianity. It died out by the end of the century. I let them tell me what they see here before I tell the story that isn't here. The slaughter of the herds of bison, the reservations, Sheridan's policy that "nits breed lice" and "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." The murder of Sitting Bull, the dance for hope, the newspaper reports inventing a violence that never was, the snow in December, Big Foot's band of Lakota, a shot fired by a deaf man, and then the massacre of 290 men, women and children at Wounded Knee. The shirts which had imbued an apocalyptic hope that they could protect against bullets and through dancing bring back a time of plenty, in the end could not protect the people from bullets, from the army, from the ugly stench of fear. No where in the exhibit are words like these from Black Elk:

" We followed down along the dry gulch, and what we saw was terrible. Dead and wounded women and children and little babies scattered all along there where they had been trying to run away. The soldiers had followed along the gulch, as they ran, and murdered them in there. Sometimes they were in heaps because they had huddled together, and some were scattered all along. Sometimes bunches of them had been killed and torn to pieces where the wagon guns hit them. I saw a baby trying to suck its mother, but she was bloody and dead."

The case looks different now that the air is filled with story. I wonder if the bullet hole is in the back of the shirt, as is the case in so many museum piece ghost dance shirts. Later, at the National Museum of the American Indians we see a ghost dance shirt with the bullet hole clearly displayed. It speaks loudly, wordlessly.

"Who writes these things?" Brett asks.Pausing for a moment he adds, "And why are they so afraid?"

I smile for a moment thinking about the stories my father told me about being a curator at the museum. He was one of those people who wrote those things, but he limited his writing to descriptions of whales and skunks, collared peccaries and golden mantled ground squirrels. I tell them that I've always wondered if the blue whale could read, how would it feel about my father's description. When he died the museum asked my family for some of his "artifacts." It scared me to think about him stuffed in a corner with his favorite hat or the "clipboard of the north American mammologist" in the case. I am very sensitive to the question I posed to them, "If there were a museum dedicated to your people, what do you think the exhibits would say?"

We are all quiet for a moment and then Brett stops us. "I have a poem to share-"

I listen to his words and think of butterfly wings, corn seeds and the stories in the cases. I hear the stories they all share with each other when we're walking from room to room or between bites of overpriced sandwiches bought in the snack shop beneath the whale. I know that each of these stories are important and that the ripples resonating from this one moment in time will wash to shores I can never imagine.

I put the corn seed in my pocket, heft my pack and smile, "Want to go the museum that was designed and curated by Native Americans?" There is a collective sigh of relief. " I just can't wait to see the light," Heather says, meaning the spring day, or maybe a little more than that.

 

A letter to Marilou Awiakta that I wrote following our trip.