LISTENING TO NATIVE AMERICAN ARTISTS

To come into direct contact with Native American arts and crafts and Native American artists, students are required to visit the American Museum of Natural History and The George Gustav Heye Center of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), Smithsonian Institution. The NMAI is a unique seeing and listening post. The Museum, in Washington, D.C., will open a facility on the National Mall by the end of the decade. This planned national museum, established by an act of Congress in 1989, is dedicated to the preservation, study, and exhibition of the life, languages, literature, history, and arts of Native Americans. The Heye Center, which serves as an adjunct exhibition and educational facility is already in operation in the Alexander Hamilton Custom House in lower Manhattan. The Center perfectly illustrates the intention of the NMAI to work in collaboration with indigenous peoples to protect and foster native cultures throughout the Western Hemisphere. From the very beginnings of the Heye Center, Native Americans were prominent in deciding what to exhibit and how to exhibit it. The NMAI is to be a place of life, not a morgue for artifacts. It affirms the survival of Native American practices, shows reverence for the spiritual objects of tradition, and attempts to draw the visitor into the culture of Native Americans through the plastic and performing arts. In this way, the vanished Indian becomes very much present. Native Americans themselves invite the public into their circle. This contrasts remarkably with the older approach seen in the American Museum of Natural History.

The Museum of Natural History presents exhibits on the Plains and Northeast and Southeast Indians, the Northwest Coast Indians, and the natives of the Arctic and Subarctic. The exhibits here are informational and almost detached from the spirit of the Native American even while a sound track plays Native American chants in the background. The viewer is separate from the objects exhibited and, despite all good intentions, the native voice seems to disappear behind the objectification of the assembled items in the exhibition. The presentation mutes the dialogue that the exhibits aim to stimulate. Only the most sensitive of listeners can discern their power. Lévi-Strauss was such a listener. He recounts his love affair with the masks displayed in the Northwest Coast Indian Gallery, "a magic place where the dreams of childhood hold a rendezvous."  But for every Lévi-Strauss there are hundreds who are barely touched by the evocative power of the objects exhibited. Even the collectors and exhibitors of these objects were at first not sensitive to the power of the objects for the Indians. Only in recent years have museums removed certain objects from exhibition out of respect for the spiritual beliefs of Native Americans and in some cases have returned objects to the care of their original tribe.

The challenge, therefore, for the NMAI was not to imitate the detached objectification of the Museum of Natural History. Far from embracing the idea of the NMAI, some Native Americans regarded it as problematic, expressing ambivalence about the exhibition of certain ritual objects from their spiritual tradition. Now several years later, it is clear that the process has succeeded, for the NMAI is not an ethnographic museum but one that combines a sense of a living tradition with a respect for the fine arts and crafts of Native Americans.

LISTENING THROUGH RESEARCH

To listen to Native Americans, one has to understand their history under the United States government. To this end, students do research, first, in the history of U.S. and Indian relations found in the documents assembled by Paul Prucha.  Each student situates a document in its context and reports on it to the class. Students are also required to report on articles in the New York Times from the nineteenth century to discern the particular slant of newspaper accounts about Native Americans. The novels, the research assignments, the text books, the videos and the research expose the students to Native Americans, their viewpoints on a variety of topics, and their religious rituals and artistic productions. For the students, as for me, a number of things might happen. Native Americans will be considered as individuals rather than stereotypes. The Plains Indians of the movies will no longer be taken to represent all Indians frozen into some period of time. The lumping of all Indians together will be replaced by an awareness of the large variety of Indian nations. Generalities will be seen as such and not mistaken for some ironclad category into which all Indians fall. Present day Indians will not be regarded as somehow inferior to those presented as the romanticized ideal types of the past. Present day Indians will retain their individuality. Like any other racial or ethnic group, contemporary Indians show wide differences of opinion among themselves on a whole range of issues. Older spokespersons like George Eastman and Luther Standing Bear  pleaded that whites understand them and the coherence and validity of their tribal way of life and presented what seem to be overly idealized portraits of native life. More recent Indian writers make no apologies.

Leslie Marmom Silko has written an alarming book full of fear and hope, Almanac of the Dead.  To Silko, the culmination of the European encounter with the Native American has become a nightmare. Deception, exploitation, unnatural lusts, disorientation, unsavoriness of every kind, the marketing of Indian spirituality are all signs that a tremendous reversal is about to take place. The signs of the times all point to it. A gathering of Native Americans will march northwards for the sake of the world. Literature plays its visionary role superbly here. The sins of the technologically superior have led to the exhaustion of the world's resources. It is not too late for a final warning. The original sin was the encounter of Indians and whites that so brutalized the Indian. This theme is seen fairly early in the relations of Indian and whites. In Life Among the Piutes, Sara Winnemucca tells of the first meeting of Piutes and whites.  When her grandfather, chief of the Piute nation, was told that a group was seen traveling eastward from California, he asked what they looked like. When he was told that they had hair on their faces and were white, he jumped up and clasped his hands together, and cried aloud, "My white brothers my long-looked for white brothers have come at last!"  To his regret, when he tries to contact his "white brothers," they rebuff him and refuse any overtures on his part as they pass through Piute territory. He gathers his people to tell them that in the beginning there was a dark boy and a dark girl and a white boy and a white girl. Their quarreling with one another led the parent to say, "Depart from each other, you cruel children--go across the mighty ocean and do not seek each other's lives." The chief explains that the Piutes are the children of the dark girl and boy, and that the party crossing their territory must be the children of the white girl and boy. He wishes to welcome them and heal the old wound.  The welcoming chiefs attitude is ironic, pathetic, and tragic in view of the white brothers' eventual total domination of his people.

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