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MR. SUAREZ: David Hurst Thomas will stay up here on the stage, and he'll be joined by
Clement Price and Richard Kurin. They will handle your questions. Let me remind you once
again, the microphone is in the back of the center aisle. We welcome your questions. Yeah,
I mean you have a little time because they're getting
themselves settled and sitting down, but please do head to the microphone. Tell us who you
are and where you're from. [Off MIC conversation]
[The question microphone is inaudible] MALE VOICE 1: - -
MR. THOMAS: - - [The answer microphones are also inaudible]
MALE VOICE 1: - - during the Civil war? MR. KURIN: - -
MALE VOICE 1: - - MR. KURIN: Yeah, I think with Henry the issue
wasn't so civil. [Laughter]
MR. KURIN: He didn't believe that the war should be. He wasn't for succession, he wasn't
for abolition, he wasn't for war. He wanted to run the Smithsonian. As he said, he ended
in Liberia or for the expatriation of - - . That was something that Lincoln, too, was part
of. MR. SUAREZ: As the next questioner makes his
or her way to the microphone, not to split hairs about it David,
but when we say here what's here when we say how many people are here? I mean, certain
nations straddled what's now the Canadian/U.S. border. There were native people all through
the Caribbean. Are we talking about what's now the 48, all of North America? What are
we talking about? MR. THOMAS: Again, I was specifically speaking
about this country and the - - figure. You bring up an interesting point, because so
much of both museum world and anthropology now is driven by the legislation. When the
National Museum of the American Indian was created in 1989, it was paired with legislation
about repatriation and reburial. That is a United States law that
all of us, on both sides, tribal sides and museum sides, and in this case those are the
same thing. We have tribal recognition in this
institution and we also have museum recognition. Much of it is played out according to the
territory of the United States because that's what the law covers. That said, there are
any number of cases across the borders where tribes are scatters, and is it possible for
a tribe that spans the Northern border and Canada, can claims be made for tribal members
that are actually living in Canada? Tough question, same true with the Ache in Arizona.
Part of it is in Mexico. So it's creating incredibly difficult legal problems, but I'll
say that one thing that's happening and in part because of the repatriation issue within
this museum, there are deals that are being worked out with international
repatriation that are not required by law. It's the right thing to do in some cases,
and we just need to figure out a way to do it.
MR. SUAREZ: Yes, tell us who you are and where you're from.
SARAH WALKER: Okay, my name is Sarah Walker, and I am the Program Manager for the Wellness
and Art Center and Iona Senior Services. We take seniors from the community and bring
them to museums like the American Indian Museum and I guess my question comes to, how do you
expect that the cultural diversity within the museums
and that evolution is going to impact the people that come and visit the museums on
a day to day basis? What are the benefits going to be to the people that walk through
the door? MR. PRICE: It seems to me that museums at
the end of the day, or maybe at the beginning of the day are places of wonder. They are
places of learning, and they are places of transformation. Over the course of my professional
life as an academic historian, which means I'm a historian who mainly works in words,
I've had an opportunity to work with a curator or to work with a education person
at a museum, or to benefit from a long friendship with people like John Franklin who is here,
and Lonnie Bunch, and Spencer Crew [phonetic], and people like that. I'm just amazed at how
there's no place quite like a museum because it's an intellectually and spiritually protected
space. There's some things that can go on in a museum that
cannot occur, say, in a theater or in a academic setting such as a college campus. With respect
to the museum I know the most about, and that would be the Newark Museum, that museum has
enabled people in a post-industrial city, people who nearly lost their city through
nearly two generations of decline in an awful spat of violence in the late 1960s, that museum
has helped to reintroduce those who bore witness to that transformation and their progeny,
how absolutely important and precious a museum in the downtown corridor of Newark,
New Jersey is. In fact, I've said on occasion, if John Cotton Dana did not come to Newark
to found the Newark Museum in 1909, Newark probably doesn't survive the second half of
the 20th Century. As the city was declining, including its downtown corridor, the museum,
and it's an art museum, but it's an art museum with a
great attitude because it displays more than art, it plays jazz, it has a wonderful Tibetan
collection, it has a very credible commitment to arts and education, because of all of that
and also until recently it had a mini zoo, because of all of these assets, a lot of people
who had written Newark off don't after a while. They begin to come back into
the city, patronizing the museum, doing so at such a clip that by the 1990s, Newark is
viewed as a recovered city. A performing arts center rises beneath the shadows of
the museum. A sports area, a massive increase in the number of college and university students,
so that's a long and convoluted way of saying museums are very special places for wonder,
discovery, and transformation. Yeah. MR. KURIN: - - 30 million visitors a year,
that's a lot. Overall, the museums across the United States literally get hundreds of
millions. I think the figure is somehow about 800 or
900 million museum visits in the country. That's more people than go to professional
baseball - - it's huge. Many of the audiences come. My wife teaches third grade. She brings
a busload of third graders to the Smithsonian. Many come and visit the Smithsonian for an
hour on Sunday, or during the week as a school trip. I think a lot of people want
to see interesting and different things. We have a history - - changing exhibitions more
to keep them fresh, interesting, to provide different sources of either inspiration, or
knowledge, or even entertainment. Our museums, though, have to meet the need of the very
large public. When people come to a place like the Smithsonian they take it as a bit
more than just an entertainment - - weekend. I get it, and people will, but it stands for
a little more than that. And there's a kind of dreadful validation - - and - - museum
it's my story of the museum, of the beliefs and the values, and the accomplishments that
I cherish or are important to me, my community, whatever that community is. - - and that bestows
- - official recognition, societal recognition of the legitimation of people's experience.
I think that's why this - - museums, because when they do that, when
a question of both inclusion - - what the American people will see when they come to
the Smithsonian. - - people across the country go to the museums in their states and cities
and so on. How we should do that and to best do that - - in that so that - - culture,
- - in a way that resonates with - - . MR. SUAREZ: Yes sir.
MS. WALKER: Okay, thank you. MALE VOICE 2: - -
MR. THOMAS: Sure, I'd be glad to tackle that. I guess my point is there's a standard story
that is played out in natural history museums here and my own as we get current with issues.
One is to use our collections to address the biodiversity issues that are surrounding us
right now. So we can use stories like the passenger pigeon, and
we can talk about Teddy Roosevelt's role as the first conservation President in this country,
and saving land, and saving archaeological sites. There's a conservation ethic that is
growing up in museums that's a very good thing. My point was in the conversation here at the
National Museum of the American Indian is too often that's confused
with losing culture, with the last real California Indian dying in 1849. The point here is there's
a lively cultural diversity that is persisting. It cannot be understood by confusing it with
the natural history message. It's giving native people the voices to tell their own stories,
and also we're still hearing survival stories. There were 25 community
curated exhibits in the first generation of the National Museum of the American Indian
from the Mapuche in Chile all the way up to the Northern latitudes. Tribal people were
invited into the collections, used the objects to tell the stories that you'd like to tell.
More often than not it's about cultural survival and cultural diversity.
MR. SUAREZ: Yes? CONSHASHA HOLMAN CONWELL [phonetic]: Conshasha
Holman Conwell, National Museum of African American History and Culture.
It's interesting that Professor Price began his remarks with a quote from the great Audre
Lorde. My question is about gender in culturally-specific museums. I've almost given up on gender in
non-culturally-specific museums. [Laughter]
MS. CONWELL: Perhaps there's a chance in this newer generation of museums
to get it right, or at least get it better. I think that gendering history is a very incomplete
project, and the results are fairly paltry, quite bluntly. Any thoughts
on the role of gender, specifically in these kinds of museums, and the state of that art?
MR. PRICE: Well, certainly over the last 15-20 years, African American historiography has
felt the very deep imprint of scholars, many of whom are women, who have re-centered black
women in slavery, in the great migration, and especially in the modern Civil
Rights movement. It could be argued that in a society that values race and manhood it's
not surprising that historically museums that narrate the African American story would tilt
toward manliness and valueize men. I see that that is changing with respect to the scholarship.
The most credible museums that I know of ultimately follow the
scholarship. So it is likely that within our lifetime we will see, again, as far as African
American museums are concerned, a much more gendered narrative toward the incredibly
important role that black women have played in African American history. As we are about
to observe the sesquicentennial of the emancipation, there's some remarkably seemingly new evidence
that before President Lincoln decided that the time was right to begin talking publically
about emancipation, the slaves were already freeing themselves. They
were mislabeled contraband, they were actually refugees. A lot of those refugees, those people
who skate behind union lines, those people who left the plantation because of the traditional
police enforcement of the lives and bodies of black people were breaking down were women.
So this whole notion that women are capable of doing remarkable
things in slavery and freedom, Conshasha, will ultimately find its way to any museum
that purports to shed light on the black experience.
MR. SUAREZ: Well, since you asked the question. Are you still up there? Oh no. Could I ask
you a question? I know it's a little odd. [Laughter]
MR. SUAREZ: You got me thinking about what, ideally, that would look like. You hit the
door cold once this museum throws open its doors
with tremendous pride of place, I mean, what a location. You walk in, how is gender handled?
Do you try to level the balance of the accumulated weight of the imbalance up until now of the
way we've told ourselves those stories? Or do you correct it just in doing a straight
up proper presentation for when you hit the door cold when that museum opens?
How do you handle a subject that has been mishandled in the past, and you're given an
opportunity to recalibrate once an institution opens?
[Off MIC conversation] [Laughter]
MS. CONWELL: - - part of it is that you feel that it's not incidental, that it's not marginalized,
that it's not - - you're going to have to ask yourself - - while you may find places
to - - [Laughter]
MS. CONWELL: - - women in this exhibition on history, on culture, on art,
because that’s where they belong. Now, that is perhaps as fantastic a vision, Ray Suarez,
as it is to think you will find Native American, Latinos, Asian Americas, and Native American,
etc. It is what we in museum work do. We live in that world of the possible and the dream
world. So that it is not incidental, that it is matter of fact in the
good sense of the world. That, of course, they're there and you don't have to just go
looking for them because they're everywhere. Thank you.
MR. SUAREZ: Thanks. MR. THOMAS: If I could just add one small
point to reinforce what you just said. I agree with that completely. To me, one of the best
exhibits that I've seen in gendered exhibits is at the Autry Museum in L.A. It's about
cowboys. They have a huge mural that goes back to the
1880s, and there are 50 cowboys in there. Three of them are women. Eight of them are
black. This isn't a gender exhibit at all. It's just portraying the things - - . You
come away thinking, "That's cool that they did that." That's an effective thing to do
without hitting somebody over the head with it.
MR. SUAREZ: Or making a separate hall of women cowboys.
[Laughter] MR. THOMAS: Yeah.
MR. SUAREZ: Which is okay too. [Laughter]
MR. SUAREZ: Yes? MR. KURIN: - - then you would probably have
someone at some point saying, "Hey - - ." - - we have a National Women in the Arts Museum - - 25
years ago. - - represented in museums generally. We - - to be located - - that too - - I think
if you looked at history - - American history museums started out as - -
railroads, - - covered wagons, boats, and so on. The - - so now we have two technology
- - so we - - another museum called the - - basically ended up with three museums around technology.
How many museums do we have on American art? We have two museums to tell the story of - - . I
guess my point is, - - is a very big story. There's a lot of people to
represent, and there's a lot of - - which we'll see. We don't raise an issue - - the
American story through - - technology. We think that's okay. We - - raise an issue if
we look at America's story through - - . We don't
raise an issue if we have too many American history museums because we have - - . - - of
very complex, sometimes contentious interesting historical story and doing that from a bunch
of buildings, well it may not all fit under one roof. I think as we look and investigate
this question we have to ask some practical questions about collections,
presentation, ways of getting different angles on a story, so we take it away, I think, from
some of the kind of highly idealistic and idealized notions that really don't reflect
how - - were. MR. SUAREZ: Yes?
NANCY BERCAW: That's a perfect segue into what I wanted to ask. I'm
Nancy Bercaw and I'm an Associate Curator over at the National Museum of American History,
the big house. [Laughter]
MS. BERCAW: I was really struck, also, by the Audre Lorde quote about using the master's
tools to dismantle the master's house, and that you were representing, because I work
a lot with the early collections of the museum, and how the early collections of the museum
shape the questions that we're able to ask today. So, indeed, those questions of that
representation of Joseph Henry are still haunting us in many ways in our museums today because
the things themselves do. We're burdened by the things. I was thinking of the master's
tools, but then I was really struck when you said, "You know, museums are these places
that are spiritual and intellectual sanctuaries." Playing off of those
two tensions, because I really do believe they're both of these things. I thought, well,
you know, we talk about balkanization of museums and we're talking in terms of race and
ethnicity, but really we should be talking about the balkanization of the museums in
terms of art, technology, and history. They become these sacred, intellectual and spiritual
places. They're both of those things combined. Perhaps the balkanization is in the disciplinary
nature of our museums, not in the subject matter. I don't know if you
all are following me there, but why can't we talk about art and history in the same
space? Why can't we have dance, performance, and science combined? I think that's what
these new anti-museums are doing, perhaps. I would like us to rethink what museums are,
and I thank you so much for bringing that up.
MR. PRICE: Thank you. Again, I spend most of my time on a college campus.
What you've described we call interdisciplinarity [phonetic].
[Laughter] MR. PRICE: At Rutgers, we no longer
hire assistant professors who claim to know one thing. In the history department we want
someone who can teach in the history department but also have a relationship with Africana
studies and women studies. We want young scholars to have at least some interest in the city
of Newark. I've been on the faculty long enough to recognize that is a
fundamental change in the nature of the academy. I agree with you. I think museums by their
very nature should be these very complicated interdisciplinary multi-layered not just buildings,
but the way curators are hired and deployed in the museum and beyond the museum.
MR. KURIN: Yeah I think the issue raised with the Autry was
interesting, because that was a TV cowboy, a performing cowboy and then merged with an
American Indian museum and a women's history center, and really reinterpreted this story
of the American West. So you have involvement
of Latinos and Asian immigrants building the railroad. I mean, it's a good case study of
how that was done. When I look at the Smithsonian, what we've been trying to do with some of
the efforts to go across the institution with Secretary Clough's creation of the consortia,
we're - - to go across the institution and look at the American experience.
You have things relating to the American experience in the portrait gallery, and American art,
and Hirshorn, and the Folk Life, American history, the - - and so on, so why not do
projects that go across those institutions? So I think we've been doing more of that.
Right now we have a number of programs dealing with the Civil War. Well, we deal with the
Civil War across the institution. There's a website that joins that, and brochures,
and other things. You can really follow the Civil War across the institution. We have
a webinar, I think, tomorrow or the next day on Thomas Jefferson with people participating
from the National Museum of American History, National Museum of African American History
and Culture, Natural History Museum, and this museum, American Indian, to talk about Jefferson's
legacy. So why not? He had impact, as was said, on Lewis and Clark, and native
country, but also in terms of the natural world, and certainly in terms of American
history and so on. I think we're looking at more. The interesting thing, of course, for
our next generation is the web starts obviating a lot of those bureaucratic structures that
have characterized our institutional boundaries and
practice. If you are my cousin Jarrod in Michigan and you want to know what the Smithsonian
has about American history of a certain period, person, or theme well you go on the
web. You don't give a hoot whether it's on the third floor west of American history,
or the second floor of the portrait gallery, or buried in the archives of American art.
You want to have access to it. I think in some ways our technology has the possibility
of actually obviating some of the boundaries of knowledge that are created by institutional
practice and structure. I think we're on the verge of a kind of new world with that. I
think we have the technology now to actually enhance and aid interdisciplinarity and connections
in the way that we have not had before. When I look at the visitorship to the Smithsonian,
again, 30 million in real people coming to the museums on the mall and
in New York, we have over 200 million people that are visiting that virtual Smithsonian,
that digital Smithsonian on the web. A lot of divisions that we've seen about dividing
up American history with culture and art will not exist
for those other 170 million people. MR. SUAREZ: You are our last two questions.
First you. LINDA CUOLCO: Okay hi. I'm Linda Cuolco [phonetic]
recently of Takoma Park, Maryland. Can't forget that. Recently retired after 40 years of federal
service, 20 of which at the Inter-American Foundation, which has collaborated
quite a bit with the National Museum of the American Indian and the Smithsonian Folk Life
Center. I just want to put a plug in of the Inter-American Foundation with the National
Museum of the American Indian has collaborated a lot on community museums. Also with the
Folk Life Center too, I think, at one of the festivals. I just think that's a very
critical area to work with the community museums where you can really work in small towns,
etcetera throughout the region on really allowing the community themselves to
tell their stories. I had another question. I was fascinated by Dr. Price's presentation,
especially the statement you made about those not yet white that now have a greater understanding
of influence of race and culture. Since many of us are those not yet white, I'm Italian
and my late husband was Jewish. I'd be curious
to hear from you, if you could expand a little bit more about that and how that is manifested.
Thank you. MR. PRICE: Thank you. A few years ago the
institution that I run at Rutgers was asked to engage all 2,300 members of the New Jersey
State Police. This is when they were under court decree for misbehaving along the highways
and byways of New Jersey in an obnoxious practice called racial profiling. I had never worked
with law enforcement officers before, but I had read quite a bit of the new scholarship
on the social construction of race, and how certain ethnic groups are racialized when
they come here because they are able to exploit pigment, because they are able to join the
union army, because they are able to intermarry beyond their clan, they become white. What
I found very interesting is that the troopers, most of whom are of white ethnic
heritage did not know that their forebears were not necessarily white on arrival. When
you walk Italians and Jewish, and they're mostly men, and they're from other places
in that kind of vast, so called Ellis Island group of people who come here in the late
19th and early 20th Centuries, when you take them through the history of their forebears,
a history they either don't know or have conveniently forgotten. One of the unforeseen consequences
of becoming white is amnesia.
[Laughter] MR. PRICE: You do forget who you once were.
A lot of these guys actually thanked me for reminding them how they look in historical
time, and how in the 19th Century the Irish, and the Italians, and the Jews had their issues
with law enforcement. Since that experience I
have really taken a great interest in the journey toward whiteness. It's a fascinating
journey. I don't mean to minimize it. It's a journey that involves certain benefits that
are accorded to the Irish, but not to the blacks. For example, in New Jersey, the Irish
are treated pretty badly, but they are never denied the right to vote, as was the case
with the blacks. The first known riot in Newark was
an anti-Irish riot. Everybody when they think of Newark they think of the 1967 riot. This
anti-Irish riot was a pretty scary riot. People were killed. The protestant whites
sought to push the Irish out of Newark. When you tell a 3rd or 4th generation Irish guy
and maybe a woman that to be Irish in the middle of the 19th Century was hardly to be
accorded whiteness as that transformation would be possible, say, in the 2nd decade
of the 20th Century. Since we're talking about the sesquicentennial so much, what I find
fascinating in the sesquicentennial, in the northern states the Irish were the largest
ethnic group to fight to save the union. Here in D.C. at Lincoln's cottage, which was not
really Lincoln's cottage back in the day, mean, Lincoln was protected by a group of
Irish union soldiers from Pennsylvania. He befriended these guys. I
believe that as a result of the Irish sacrifice in that war, after the Civil War, that's when
the Irish make their great, in many ways, heroic climb into American society as cops,
as firemen, as politicians, as Americans. Every group is not able to replicate that
because of our fascination with pigment, and also the long trepidations associated with
enslavement, but the study of how certain groups can reinvent themselves as whites and
other groups cannot I find very fascinating. MR. SUAREZ: This will have to be our last
question, ma'am. DIANA BAIRD N’DIAYE: Thank you. Diana Baird
N'Diaye from the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. I actually worked at the American
Museum of Natural History when I started my career, but my real heart was with community-based
museums. I was so glad that the last questioner mentioned that. What my question has to do
with is how we create networks of community-based museums that interact with the larger museums,
and bridge some of the possible essentialism of museums. Many people have
dual heritages. We interact and it's such a complex society both culturally and socially.
How do you see bridging the heritage and culturally-specific museums on a community level? I know some
of this is being done already, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.
MR. THOMAS: I didn't talk about the outreach part of the National Museum of the
American Indian. I haven't been on the board for several years, and can't speak to it today
but I do know that you raise a great point about the relationship, in this case, between
the new National Museum of the American Indian here on the doorstep of congress and Indian
country. Why should native people trust the federal government any more now
than they have all along? How is it that this museum can speak for tribal groups? It's not
just North America. It's Central and South America. To his credit, I think, Rick West
saw this right away. Initially this museum had to be sold to Indian people. How is that
done? There is a three-year consultation process of going out into the community, talking to
people, and listening? What should his museum look like? In California I know you got the
message it should tell the story that all Indians don't live in teepee's
now, which is one issue, and most of them never did. What do you want out of your National
Museum of the American Indian? Then further than that, because 30% of the collection came
from outside this country in Central and Southern America. There has been, to me, unbelievable
outreach. Now that it's facilitated with web features, the amount
of involvement where artifacts can go out into Indian country without ever leaving.
There's a huge internship program here where native
people come and learn the craft of museums, learn to build exhibits, learn how to tell
their stories, how to conserve the artifacts. My experience has been there's an extraordinary
outreach that's going here. Already we're seeing alumni from this institution changing
the smaller tribal museums certainly across the country.
MR. SUAREZ: Richard Kurin, does the Smithsonian outpost in San Antonio offer any lessons about
how to create a relationship, how to build a hybrid museum? It's become a real anchor
for the revitalization of what had been a cultural strip for Mexican-Americans in San
Antonio. Now it has all kinds of wonderful spinoffs going on.
MR. KURIN: Yeah, and the Alameda is one of now 170 affiliate museums of the Smithsonian
across the country. Actually this afternoon we'll hear from several members of those
affiliate museums as a way of indeed connecting the Smithsonian to various communities, a
larger nation, and quite frankly also getting out of Washington. It's not all knowledge
and inspiration as in Washington. I think that reflects what this museum realized, which
is many native peoples were actually west of the Mississippi. This museum had to talk
to folks, so how do you do that? There was a notion here of the fourth museum, of the
museum that was dispersed in Indian country. Dillon Ripley tried a great experiment in
the late 60s in developing the Anacostia Museum at that time, which was across the river in
Anacostia. People thought that Dillon Ripley was crazy. Why would
you put a museum across there? We'll probably hear from Camille Akeju here later in the
afternoon. The idea of centering a museum in neighborhoods and in
communities is not a bad strategy if you're not only trying to push stuff out and reach
people, but also take ideas in. I think that’s what the affiliates program, I think that's
what a number of art programs, Lonnie Bunch these days, and Camille, and Rex, and their
colleagues at the African American museum had been holding sessions in different cities
across the United States. Not only in terms of generating collections for the Smithsonian,
but generating collections and ideas for local museums, for state and regional museums, so
that a lot more people can participate in the museuming [phonetic]. There's a confession.
I frankly thought, as an anthropologist, I have that lineage
too, I thought museums might fade away in a post-Colonial era. Maybe they were a thing
of a different age, but they're not. They're here to stay, and they're very vibrant. Now
there's 50,000 museums across the world. 17,000 museums in the United States. Museums aren't
going away. They're a way, indeed, of gathering up people's ideas and feelings, putting them
in a place, and giving them value. It's kind of amazing - - . If we're going to be part
of that movement, of that museum, and that museum of the 21st Century, how do we
do it? Joseph Henry had a lot of things he said I didn't quite agree with.
[Laughter] MR. KURIN: Probably many of you wouldn't agree
with too, but one of the things Henry-- MR. SUAREZ: You've got to forgive him though.
He's like 216 years old. [Laughter]
MR. KURIN: I know. One of the things he did do which was so interesting, he took that
idea. Thomas Jefferson had the original idea of the weather buddies. People
across the United States participating in the effort to understand and rationalize the
weather, he didn't have the technology to do it. Henry, with the telegraph did. He sent
thermometers and barometers across the country. Every day people would telegraph in their
readings of the weather to the Smithsonian. That's what led to the
weather map. It's kind of a great example of citizen science. I think we're at the moment
in this time in our museum, culture, and technology where indeed we can do massive waves of citizen-citizenship,
citizen - - , citizen-democracy. That is, really use the tools of technology so it can
be inclusive and very broad and widespread across the country. Using
the tools of the museum, using the value of the museum with the tools of new technology
to tell a much more inclusive story that resonates across this country and around the world.
MR. SUAREZ: Please thank our panelists. [Applause]
MR. SUAREZ: I'm going to level with you. I did a bad thing that moderators should not
do. I lost control of the clock, but the conversation was interesting, so I let it run 10 minutes
over. That means you really have to promise me
that you're going to be back in your seats and ready to get back to work at 1:30. The
best cafeteria of all the Smithsonian's, I can say that because I don’t work for you
guys, is in this building. So please enjoy your lunch, enjoy your break, be back here
ready to go at 1:30.