Learn about the efforts of the National Museum of the American Indian to preserve Native American culture, traditions, and beliefs
Learn about the efforts of the National Museum of the American Indian to preserve Native American culture, traditions, and beliefs
A discussion of the efforts to preserve Native American culture, from the documentary Native Voice: Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.
Great Museums Television (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Transcript
[Music in]
NARRATOR: On the whole, Native Americans spent a good deal of the 20th century trying to get away from museums.
ELAINE HEUMANN GURIAN: The Native American community has been the single largest change agent in the museum world in the last half-century.
NARRATOR: Culminating in the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. It opened in 2004.
MARJORIE SCHWARZER: Americans believed that the Native American culture had gone extinct. You have anthropologists going out and just grabbing stuff, digging up graves and, in some extreme cases, actually accessioning live human beings, such as Ishi from California, who lived in a museum. So you've got these—these terrible stories.
NARRATOR: Now tribal leaders can request—and the law will require—that sacred objects and ancestral remains be returned or repatriated to the tribe.
RICK WEST: We're talking about interpreting and representing living cultures and living peoples at the National Museum of the American Indian. It's not just talking about a past that may have belonged to the life of Native peoples. It's talking about their present and their future and the fact that they are still here.
NARRATOR: Founding director Rick West is Cheyenne.
ELAINE HEUMANN GURIAN: One of the things that Rick West understood in the beginning was that if we were going to build the museum different, as he called it, we would have to ask Indian people about what kind of museum they wanted.
NARRATOR: The museum tries to represent all of the more than 500 tribes in the U.S. and the nearly 35 million Native people of Central and South America. What they said was not more objects but an inviting place where cultural exchanges could happen. The vast rotunda is that place. But it's the Cultural Resource Center, in Maryland, that's the soul of the museum. Here nearly one million objects are housed and used in tribal ceremonies. Traditional Native American belief holds that many objects are imbued with the spirit of the maker, so special care—even food, light, or water—is sometimes required.
ELAINE HEUMANN GURIAN: The central, core issue about the National Museum of the American Indian is that Indians are telling you their view of the things. And it's very new and different for non-Indian America to understand that the things—the same things they saw before—can be talked about entirely differently.
[Music out]
NARRATOR: On the whole, Native Americans spent a good deal of the 20th century trying to get away from museums.
ELAINE HEUMANN GURIAN: The Native American community has been the single largest change agent in the museum world in the last half-century.
NARRATOR: Culminating in the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. It opened in 2004.
MARJORIE SCHWARZER: Americans believed that the Native American culture had gone extinct. You have anthropologists going out and just grabbing stuff, digging up graves and, in some extreme cases, actually accessioning live human beings, such as Ishi from California, who lived in a museum. So you've got these—these terrible stories.
NARRATOR: Now tribal leaders can request—and the law will require—that sacred objects and ancestral remains be returned or repatriated to the tribe.
RICK WEST: We're talking about interpreting and representing living cultures and living peoples at the National Museum of the American Indian. It's not just talking about a past that may have belonged to the life of Native peoples. It's talking about their present and their future and the fact that they are still here.
NARRATOR: Founding director Rick West is Cheyenne.
ELAINE HEUMANN GURIAN: One of the things that Rick West understood in the beginning was that if we were going to build the museum different, as he called it, we would have to ask Indian people about what kind of museum they wanted.
NARRATOR: The museum tries to represent all of the more than 500 tribes in the U.S. and the nearly 35 million Native people of Central and South America. What they said was not more objects but an inviting place where cultural exchanges could happen. The vast rotunda is that place. But it's the Cultural Resource Center, in Maryland, that's the soul of the museum. Here nearly one million objects are housed and used in tribal ceremonies. Traditional Native American belief holds that many objects are imbued with the spirit of the maker, so special care—even food, light, or water—is sometimes required.
ELAINE HEUMANN GURIAN: The central, core issue about the National Museum of the American Indian is that Indians are telling you their view of the things. And it's very new and different for non-Indian America to understand that the things—the same things they saw before—can be talked about entirely differently.
[Music out]