If there is one word that can be used to describe the new American Indian Museum it is incomplete. While excited crowds and a nearby festival mark the exterior of the building, the interior of the building does not live up to expectations.
The incompleteness starts with the inability to decide if the subjects of the museum are "American Indians" or "Native Americans." Throughout the museum's four floors, the names of the exhibits are used interchangeably, as if they mean precisely the same thing, when in fact they do not. Both titles are only somewhat descriptive, though that is perhaps the nature - and tragedy - of their story.
Also, the name "American Indian Museum" is somewhat of a misnomer. It would be much more accurate to call it the "American Indian Mall, Gallery and Museum." The first two of four floors consist of an exhibition floor, two gift shops, a cafeteria and a movie theater showing 10-20 minute films about Indian life.
This isn't to say that the gift shops don't sell some great stuff, but the viewer feels somewhat cheated. It's a bit like going to Disney World, where you can't get to Splash Mountain until you've passed through rows of stores hawking every conceivable piece of merchandise.
However, despite - or perhaps because of - the abundance of merchandise, the gift shops were by far the most well attended part of the museum. Next to practically every $1 postcard and $55,000 statue, there were two or three customers ogling the merchandise for something to bring home.
When you leave the gift shop and make your way up to the third floor, there are three exhibits to see: a resource center, an art gallery and an examination of tribes and Indian lives from eight different communities.
The resource center contains 18 computers, but beyond the helpful and enthusiastic staff, the computer resources were not up to par. When I typed in "Custer" and "Indian Wars," the only thing that came up were recipes, the National Indian Gaming Association and Peace Party Comic Books. In the activities part of the computer, the only thing a viewer can do is e-mail a postcard. Beyond a list of tribes with a paragraph length description, the resource center wasn't much more than a partial encyclopedia.
Luckily, once you enter the Native Modernism part of the museum, you can see beautiful examples of Indian culture in the art of Allan Houser and George Morrison. Morrison's art includes huge, stunning landscapes made entirely of wood and abstract watercolors of sunsets over Lake Superior.
Houser's art was centered on the family, with drawings, paintings and sculptures of parents and children, in particular the protective and nurturing role of American Indian mothers. In one moving sculpture, a mother envelopes her child in her clothes, symbolizing their bond.
The art gallery transitions into an exhibit called "Our Lives," where music, crafts, fishing and even gambling casinos are highlighted as activities and livelihoods of today's North American Indians. Books, like Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," and music are highlighted, as well as a sad set of exhibits on what it means to be a modern American Indian. This display serves as a sensitive prelude to the fourth floor exhibit, which portrays the tragic and troubling interaction between European colonists and American Indians.
In the "Our Peoples" fourth floor exhibit, the museum does a fair job of showing American and American Indian reactions to Christianity, dispossession and resistance. In "Coiled Dragons," roughly 100 guns from the 19th and 20th centuries mark the American Indian wars. On the adjacent side, a wall of American, European and Indian Bibles show proselytizing Christianity and its effects.
In one example, the Native American Church in the late 1800s began using the drug peyote to get hallucinatory spiritual experiences. Needless to say, American churches were not pleased with the use of any drugs to attain spirituality and the drug wasn't partially legalized until 1994.
The museum moves through American Indian identity until it reaches its final exhibit called "Our Universes," which explores the Indian relationship with the land and spirituality. Under an artificial night the exhibit takes visitors through an Indian solar year and allows them to experience - if only briefly - a deeply moving portrayal of a people's intimate relationship with the land.
One picture in particular may cause spectators to pause: an Indian in traditional garb praying underneath a spectacular snow-capped mountain, reminding visitors of a land before time, untouched by progress and strongly resonant of a spirituality rarely associated with this country.
Upon leaving the museum, one wishes that its creators spent another six months designing it and thinking through the exhibits. Although it contained elements of beauty and education, it often felt incomplete. From when visitors first pass through the doors and then through the exhibits, it is impossible to not notice that the empty spaces make up at least one-third of the entire museum. While deadlines surely played a major part in this, it's difficult not to feel disappointed.
However, with that disappointment came a realization that every single American Indian, whether as a worker or visitor, had a warm, knowledgeable and enthusiastic presence as if to say, "Learn more about me"
