DAVID HURST THOMAS: For the invitation to
be here, and also send along my sympathies
in this difficult time.
I want to go back 25 years to a phone call
I got from Dr. Robert McCormick Adams.
Now, I knew Dr. Adams as one of the premier
anthropologists in the world.
He wasn't calling me in that regard.
He was the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.
Dr. Adams told me about this brand new museum
that was going to begin here.
It's called the National Museum of the American
Indian.
He said this wonderful collection of 800,000
artifacts was coming from New York City and
it's
going to be part of the Smithsonian.
Mandated by law, most of the board of that
new Smithsonian museum will be Native American.
He said, "But I think it's important that
an
anthropological voice be there as well.
Would you be willing to become a founding
trustee of the National Museum of the American
Indian?
I'd been working as a curator of anthropology
for a long time, and asked him if he thought
it was appropriate that we have a trustee
who is also a curator at another museum in
New York.
He said, "Yeah."
And I said, "Does that make me the token anthropologist
on the Indian board?"
And he said, "Yeah, pretty much."
[Laughter]
MR.
THOMAS: He said, and fasten your seatbelts,
because it's going to be a fun ride.
This will be a museum different.
Now, that phrase, museum different caught
on in the founding
of this institution.
Our first task as board was to find a Director
who would come in and build a museum and define
a definition of the museum different.
It didn't take long to
find that Rick West was the right person for
the job.
So, when Rick first addressed the board, the
obvious question came up.
Different from what?
Rick told a story.
He said that when he was a kid he was traveling
with his father, Richard West Senior, who
was a distinguished Southern Cherokee painter.
Rick had grown up in Muskogee in that family.
They went to New York City.
As it turned out, they went to the museum
where I worked for 40 years, the American
Museum of Natural History.
Rick said, we went into that place and saw
this incredible collection of American Indian
artifacts, one of the very best in the world.
Then he said, "We went over and we looked
at the dinosaurs and the dinosaur eggs,
and all the other fossils that where there.
That's the best collection in the world."
As they were leaving, a young Rick turned
to his father and said, "Why do they have
Indians
grouped in with the dinosaurs and the fossils?"
His father said, "They must think we're extinct
too."
Rick told us that story and said, "If I'm
asked what the museum different is all about,
it's different from that.
It's different from natural history.
It's different from anthropology."
Those museums, in his words, are the final
ugly unadorned edge of manifest
destiny.
Tough words.
He also quoted probably the most influential
anthropologist of the 20th Century, Albert
Kroger [phonetic] who said, "The last real
California Indian died in 1849."
I was getting a little uncomfortable at this
point, and began to worry what is this connection,
at least in Rick's mind, and it turned out
in the rest of the
board's mind as well, between manifest destiny,
colonialism, natural history, anthropology,
and by extension, me - the token anthropologist
on the board?
Well,
as we look back, as I look back in American
history it's pretty obvious when colonialism
started here, if you discount the Viking presence
1,000 years ago, which did really happen.
Colonialism started here when a very lost
Spanish explorer came across on the shores
of a place that was locally called Guanahani
that he changed the name to San Salvador.
He
took possession, he changed the names, he
took up a collection, sending several Guanahani's
and other people from the Caribbean back to
Europe to demonstrate his claim.
Those three processes, finders/keepers, the
name game, and taking up a collection would
be replayed 300 years later.
We all know Thomas Jefferson as the third
President of the United States.
He's also the first scientific archaeologist
in this country.
He dug a burial mound on his plantation in
Virginia knowing full well that
native groups were still using that as a sacred
place.
His scientific description was so good that
I still use it in my textbooks.
Beyond that, Jefferson sent out the Lewis
and Clark expedition after the Louisiana Purchase
to explore the Trans Mississippian west.
The parallels with Columbus are uncanny.
Both of them were seeking an inland passage,
a way to get to China.
Both of them were taking possession of a new
land.
Lewis and Clark literally carried with them
a branding iron to put on trees, property
of the U.S. government.
Both of them played the name game.
Lewis and Clark were told, "Name everything
and map it.
If the French have a name on it, respect it.
If the Indian people
have a name on it, change it to something
that's really American, and bring home a collection."
Jefferson was a fanatic on studying Native
American languages, archaeology, and
the rest.
So when Lewis and Clark came back, they had
an amazing amount of booty.
They had plants, they had animals, they had
fossils, and they had all sorts of American
Indian artifacts that they brought back with
them.
Many of those ended up in the antechamber
of Monticello, Jefferson's mansion.
He arranged them all very carefully.
So you'd
have a mammoth tusk and huge elk antlers over
here, and a Mandan war shirt over here, and
a pipe from the Northwest coast.
Because in Jefferson's mind that was what
natural history is about.
It's the natural history of this country.
After all, American Indians are not really
that different than the mammoths and the mastodons,
in his
mind.
This is the first natural history museum in
this country, created by our third president.
Now, there's a linkage between certainly manifest
destiny and colonialism with
a little bit of grave robbing thrown in.
It also kicked off the golden age of the museums
this country.
1840, the Smithsonian materializes.
A little bit later my museum in New York 1869.
Harvard gets a museum, the Field Museum is
established after the world's Columbian exposition.
Each one of those museums is tasked with pretty
much the same thing.
Let's build up a collection, let's show it
to the public, and let's do research.
As we've heard already, so much of 19th Century
anthropology looked at the history of the
world, the human history through racial eyes.
It was a bioliaation [phonetic] of human history.
Of course, if you're going to do that through
biology, you do that by
reading skulls.
So each of the major natural history museums
in the 19th Century were building these skull
libraries, and there weren't enough skulls
to go around.
A huge amount
of competition, the skull wars, museums competing
with each other to build a better collection.
Louie Agassiz, who was running the Harvard
Museum at the time, arguably the most famous
scientist in the world, looked at it a different
way.
As the battlefield shifted from the Civil
War to the American West, he saw that as an
incredible waste of natural
0:08:44.7history specimens, dead Indians lying
all over the battlefields when they should
be collected and put in the skull libraries
of the major natural history museums.
So he worked out a deal with the Secretary
of war to collect a lot of those battlefield
remains, send them to the war museum here
in Washington, and ultimately they ended up
in the Smithsonian
Institution.
There's kind of a connection with what I do.
Those are anthropology museums, those are
human skull collections, those existed in
all the museums that I had been
working in.
One of the participants in the skull wars
was named Franz Boas.
He was a German immigrant with a Ph.D. in
physics.
He came to America to do something called
anthropology.
He had a prickly personality and couldn't
get a job, so he had to support himself.
He went to the Northwest coast of Canada and
collected anthropological songs,
tales, and legends, and he supported himself
by digging up graves.
He could support his trip, $5 for a skull,
$15 for a complete specimen.
10 years after that, Franz Boas was hired
by my museum in New York to define anthropology,
which he did.
He moved on to Columbia University.
His most famous student was Margaret Mead,
but his most influential
student was Alfred Kroger.
The same Kroger who said, "The last real Californian
Indian died in 1849."
Alfred Kroger is my intellectual grandfather.
Kroger had lots of
students, and I studied under some of those
students when I was in school.
When I came to graduate school I did because
I had a passion about American Indians.
I thought native people had been screwed by
American history, and I wanted to try to do
something about it.
What I was told is if I go and study anthropology
I can become the expert in American
history and culture.
I was told that all the real Indians were
gone, they'd turned into cowboys.
If anybody's going to save American Indian
history it's going to be people like me.
Study real hard, take vows of academic poverty,
and you'll be the person who writes the books,
and appears in court cases to help with land
claims and the rest of
it.
You'll show up and give the lectures, and
I was told if Indian people ever care about
their history, they can come to you and ask
about it.
I believed it.
Kroger had said
it.
My professors had said it.
So I studied real hard.
We idolized Kroger.
All of us grew beards, Kroger had a great
beard.
Most of it was about the guys.
We wanted to be the next Kroger.
Well, I worked hard, and I got a good job.
That call from Secretary Adams was reinforcing
exactly that.
Here is my chance to come to the Smithsonian,
be
a founding trustee of this institution, and
finally do something to help American Indians
with their history.
I couldn't understand why at my first board
meeting.
We were in David Rockefeller's office and
we were heading down to the customs house.
We all got in a taxicab.
I looked, and all the other board members
who were in there were
native, but that's not surprising.
Almost everybody was on that board.
They were surprised to see me.
Someone passed a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes
around that New York
taxicab, and they all lit up, and they all
blew smoke in my face.
[Laughter]
MR.
THOMAS: They said, "This is an Indian cab.
You know, we invented tobacco.
You're not going to be comfortable here.
We don't need anthropologists to tell us our
story."
I kind of sat up straight and thought, "Well,
just what I
heard.
They don't know anything about their history,
and when they're ready I'd be glad to help
them out with it."
[Laughter]
MR.
THOMAS: Then we had another board meeting
a little further along.
We were debating some fine point about what
this outfit's going to look like.
A not so subtle voice
came from one of the other board members.
She said, "Someone in this room needs to take
Indian 101."
I knew full well who she was talking about.
As time went on, I tried to
pay attention.
I began to see myself more as a student rather
than as a professor.
I started to kind of see why many people in
that room, the board of the museum different,
could see what Rick West had called the final
ugly edge of manifest destiny in what I was
doing, and what anthropologists were doing,
and what natural history museums were doing.
Their point was, after all these decades of
warfare and disease, the final coup de grace
were the anthropologists coming and taking
away what was left of their material culture
to the big-time museums of the east.
I could see why that might bother them.
We began working on the main objective of
this National Museum of the American Indian.
The
primary objective, the way it evolved, was
basically to change the way that non-Indian
people like me viewed Indian people and Indian
culture.
This raised numbers of
issues.
We need this museum, the museum different
was going to stop dealing with Indians as
somehow vestigial, as frozen in time, as rapidly
passing somewhere into the historical beyond.
They're going to stop showing Indians as not
having any capacity to survive or to change.
The museum different is going to stop the
kind of phony objectivity, what I
came to call physics envy, what anthropologists
did in terms of turning native people into
specimens to be displayed almost like sub-human
fossils.
The museum different was going to denounce
the complete vesting of their story in people
like me, in the natural historians and the
anthropologists, and instead involve native
communities in a significant
way.
In other words, the National Museum of the
American Indian was not about dead and dying
people.
It was not about cultures falling off the
stage of history.
It was about the
here and it was about the now.
Particularly, what came out in those discussions
was to put the lie once and for all to that
notion of the American melting pot.
As Rick West put it, "We've got to stop looking
at American culture as just some kind of common
soup."
He called it "cultural gruel, tasteless and
grey."
There was nothing tasteless and grey about
the parade that opened this institution in
2004.
Something like 25,000 Native American people
from North and South America came to the mall
and walked to this very place to open these
doors.
It was the most colorful thing I've ever seen.
Their message was simple, this is the largest
gathering of American Indian communities ever.
It's triggered by
the opening of the National Museum of the
American Indian.
Science says there are more Indians in this
country today than there were when Columbus
arrived, but that parade
made the point in crystal clear terms.
The question is, how is this museum going
about the notion of decolonizing our perceptions
in this country of American Indians?
We can see the overtones of manifest destiny,
but how do you decolonize things?
This museum did it in several fairly simple
ways.
First, by injecting the first person Indian
voice in the halls that stand out here beyond
these doors.
Those halls are created not by people who
are informants, who are answering to the authority
of anthropology, instead these are genuine
participants in the scholarly process and
the living culture.
It's an explicit recognition that these are
experts in their own culture, whether
anthropologists like me recognize it or not.
These halls have fundamentally changed the
way in which museums view and present the
humanities of Indian people.
This
world is faced with a huge problem of declining
biodiversity, but that's not happening with
Native American people.
We still have the cultural diversity, and
natural history museums tend to confuse biodiversity
with cultural diversity.
That confusion will not happen in the halls
of this museum.
There's a curatorial liberation that's going
on
here.
We've got 800,000 objects in the collection,
but they're not presented as just objects.
They're presented as departure points for
themes and ideas, all in a new living and
social space.
To use the term that got kicked around the
boardroom a lot, this is the anti-museum,
and it's deliberately so.
Secretary Adams spent a lot of time working
with us on these concepts.
His take reinforced the same thing.
Secretary Adams was also an anthropologist.
He also recognized the need to change museums
from being a temple, a place
of collectibles that was ruled by a superior
and self-ruling priesthood.
That's the natural historians, that's the
anthropologist, that's me.
Today it's a forum.
It's a place that's not devoted to maintaining
the status quo in what we think, but rather
opening up a multi-cultural conversation about
what really is.
That was the message to Indian
country that created the turnout for that
parade.
It continues to be the message as people come
to the American public as they walk inside
the door.
This museum had another important function,
anthropology.
Rick West tackled this head on.
When he defined the museum different as different
from anthropology museums, he took it up with
anthropologists.
He came to one of the national meetings of
the American Anthropological Association and
made a presentation.
He knew he was walking into the valley of
the shadow
of evil.
[Laughter]
MR.
THOMAS: But he called it the new inclusiveness.
He started out by conceding the rocky road
that we'd all been over.
He talked about the discourse probably creating
more heat than light, and the lauded the altruism
of people like me who cared about American
Indians,
anthropologists, but we didn't know what to
do.
We were part of the problem, not part of the
solution.
So he said, "With the new inclusiveness, we're
not going to go with a reverse exclusionary
policy.
Anthropologists will always be welcome in
the National Museum of the American Indian,
but the rules of the road have changed."
What Rick meant,
repatriation and reburial.
It's a revisiting of collections, not just
this one, but collections across the country
with inappropriate "objects" including human
remains.
It's trying
to make that right and work with tribes.
It's part of the law, but it also goes far
beyond that.
Native American people are in museums of this
country, including mine, in a way that we
have never seen before.
Some of it may be driven by repatriation,
but it's opening up all sorts of doors.
Exhibitions in this country, at those museums
of natural
history, controlled by anthropologists like
me, note we will never see those exhibits
again conducted without not just a couple
of informants coming in and talking about
artifacts, but a legitimate consultation about
what those exhibits ought to look like.
Not only are we doing it, but we're welcoming
it.
It's giving us so much
better museum exhibits than the ones we had
before.
It turns out the new inclusiveness cuts both
ways.
Anthropology has become, as I'm hinting here,
much more welcoming of
native people.
We have, for 20 years now, a Native American
scholarship fund that's making funding available.
It was started by anthropologists like me
signing over the royalties on our books about
Indians to create a scholarship fund.
If native people would like an experience
to anthropology and archaeology, here's some
assistance to do it.
We now
have programs all over the country.
Tribal historic preservation officers, great
model on the pattern of state, historic preservation
officers.
We now have the first accredited American
Indian Tribal Museum with the Seminoles of
Florida.
When I came on board in 1989, we had (in my
field) one practicing anthropologist who had
a Ph.D. Now
we have more than a dozen.
Ten years from now we'll have five dozen.
What's happening here is a blurring of the
lines between those people who were fighting
before this institution
started.
There's an understanding, as Rick pointed
out.
The doors will be open to anthropologists,
but the rules have changed.
The doors are also open to native people to
work with us and help make our anthropology
a better place to live.
The National Museum of the American Indian
began as the museum different.
It was different from natural
history.
It was different from anthropology, and it
still is.
The museum different quickly became something
else.
It became a museum of the native voice, not
an anthropological voice, and it still is.
The National Museum of the American Indian
has evolved into a native, civic space where
Indian people come with great regularity,
sacred sites are worshiped here.
There's a great deal that's happened that
couldn't have been predicted.
The anti-museum.
So the National Museum of the American Indian
is both
a cause and an effect.
It's an end, and it's a beginning.
Because of the events that have transpired
in building and operating this place, the
world of natural history will never be the
same.
The world of anthropology will never be the
same, and that's a good thing.
Thank you.
[Applause]
