Questions – Thoughts From The Middle of Nowhere

I see in the local rag a story about the new <a href="http://www.billingsgazette.com//index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2004/09/22/build/nation/30-triumph-and-tribute.inc" target="_blank">Indian Museum</a> in Washington DC. I have read quite a few stories about the new museum in the past few days and the whole thing seems like quite a triumph for Indians. I'm curious as to what there goal is though. To me a museum is about facts and science. According to <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29125-2004Sep17.html" target=_blank">this story</a> science and facts have no place in this museum. n nBut the National Museum of the American Indian has no anthropology department and likely never will. Gerald McMaster, a deputy assistant director for the museum and a Plains Cree, says, "Anthropology as a science is not practiced here." n nScience, McMaster suggests, tries to impose an objective truth upon things that might not always lend themselves to such a framework. Science is not going to be the final arbiter at the museum. Says McMaster, "We look to the communities" — the natives themselves — "as authorities about who they are." n<!–more–> nSo truth about the Native Americans is not a factor hear. Most of the time if somebody is trying to hide the truth, there is some pretty dirty laundry in the past somewhere. n nIf this is a muesum about Native Americans don't you think it would talk about how they came to be on this continent. I think this question is a very valid one for a museum. n nOne thing visitors won't encounter in the museum is a scientific explanation of how the Americas were populated. Until fairly recently, scientists were confident that Asian hunters migrated across the Bering Strait on a land bridge during the Ice Age. New evidence, however, has cast doubt on that simple scenario. Some scholars believe people came by boat and land in multiple migrations. None of this, however, is discussed in the Indian Museum. It conflicts with the cosmologies of many native peoples, who believe they have occupied their lands since the beginning of time. n nThey probably don't want to bring the subject up because they feel threatned for some reason by clues there might have been other migrations. These clues are from the <a href="http://www.cr.nps.gov/aad/kennewick/" target="_blank">Kennewick man</a> and <a href="http://www.scienceblog.com/community/article4017.html" target="_blank">this recent story</a> about remains found in Mexico being related to Australian Aboriginals and not the more common Native American Indians. I personally don't see why they are so threatned but they are. n nThis muesum is only about the cultures that are here today. What about Indian cultures that are no longer around? n nBy focusing on living cultures, the museum may find it tricky to talk about cultures of the distant past. There is no exhibit in the museum, for example, about the great mound-building cultures of North America, or about Cahokia, a city in the Mississippi Valley near present-day St. Louis, that probably had more than 20,000 inhabitants a thousand years ago — more than London. Museum spokesman Thomas Sweeney said he's fascinated by Cahokia but wasn't sure how it would fit into the museum's present-tense, first-person approach. But West, the museum director, said that an exhibit on Cahokia would be possible if officials had discussions with current Indian tribes in the Mississippi Valley. n nAgain, why are they so afraid to have an exhibt on such an important cuture in America? It appears this musuem is about defining who the American Indians are according to what they want the truth to be, not based upon the actual truth. It seems like an awful waste of taxpayer money to boost the ego of a segment of our population at the expense of the truth. n nFalse history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news. False history gets written every day. Adrienne Rich