Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
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 ***. 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]