Honoured At Last...

A truely wonderful thing...

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NMAI not just a decoration

Museum opening on National Mall signals end to years of horror

Posted: September 18, 2004 - 8:36am EST
by: Jim Adams / Associate Editor / Indian Country Today


WASHINGTON - Five unnamed victims of the 1864 Sand Creek massacre hold a place of honor among the thousands of people contributing to the opening of the new National Museum of the American Indian building on the National Mall Sept. 21.

Nearly 40 years of planning and campaigning prepared the way for the dramatic new building. The week of festivities surrounding its opening signals that it is already being viewed as a major event in modern Native history. But the Sand Creek victims, and a gruesome reminder of their fate, stand out as the catalyst for the agreement that brought the museum into being. Their story shows that the museum is not just another cultural repository; it is meant to be nothing less than a revolution in the role indigenous peoples play in the dominant American society.

The origin of the museum is closely bound with several landmark measures reversing generations of cultural oppression. The intricate and prolonged negotiations that produced the legislation for the NMAI also brought about passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which overturned the attitude of previous generations that Indians had dead or dying cultures.

In August 1989, legislation to establish NMAI was pending in Congress, and the trustees of the Museum of the American Indian in New York, the source of the core George Gustav Heye Collection, were close to a final deal to turn it over to the Smithsonian Institution. But the final sticking point was the issue of repatriation. The Smithsonian held tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of Native human remains and funeral objects collected during a century when Indians were dehumanized objects of scientific inquiry. Throughout the talks with the Smithsonian, the trustees of the Heye Collection were learning to their horror just how extensive the human holdings were.

The writer and activist Suzan Shown Harjo, a trustee of the Heye Collection and one of the principal negotiators, said, "We were dealing with the Indian issues and we were dealing with the museum issues. It was all intertwined. But the final piece of it had to be a repatriation agreement. And the Smithsonian said ‘no.’"

Harjo recalled that she had flown to New Mexico, where the Smithsonian and the National Congress of the American Indians, which she also served as executive director, had scheduled a reception at the Wheelwright Museum during the Santa Fe Indian Market. "The purpose of the reception was to celebrate the pendency of the National Museum of the American Indian and to make the final push for legislation," she said, but the parallel agreement on human remains and cultural property was still unresolved.

"So I told Secretary of the Smithsonian Bob Adams that we were out of time. We had to have a repatriation agreement."

Harjo was making a long-distance call to Adams at his home in Colorado. Before she left, someone, an inside source she still hesitates to name, had given her a cache of documents about the source of some of the Smithsonian’s more gruesome holdings. During the call, she said, "I was looking at bills of lading from the Anthropological Archives showing how the remains of five of the Sand Creek massacre victims had wound up in his institution."

A Southern Cheyenne citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho nation of Oklahoma, Harjo counts all the Sand Creek victims as her relatives. She still speaks with a catch about seeing the bills of lading. "I just couldn’t continue," she said.

"There it was. I was holding it in my hands, "One male Cheyenne crania …" These were the bills of lading that went with each head.
"I said, ‘I can’t talk to you any more. We’re out of time.’"

The continued absence of an agreement, Harjo said, meant that the Native coalition would start filing lawsuits. "We had lots of lawsuits ready to go.

"He said how much time did he have, and I said, ‘an hour.’" When he hung up, Harjo called Walter Echo-Hawk, a Pawnee lawyer at the Native American Rights Fund in Colorado, to get ready to file, maybe as early as the next morning.

"But Bob Adams called back and said, ‘We have a deal.’"

On Sept. 12, 1989, Adams and Harjo joined U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, D-Hawaii and U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., then a Democratic U.S. Representative, to announce a revised Smithsonian policy on repatriation that would be included in the NMAI bill. NMAI Director W. Richard West Jr., himself Southern Cheyenne, said that Inouye was deeply offended by the collection of human remains and insisted on the repatriation language. Even Secretary Adams came to change his mind on repatriation, said West, "because of the power of Suzan’s negotiating."

President George H.W. Bush signed the NMAI legislation on Nov. 28. "Twelve years were packed into 12 weeks," said Harjo.

But the turning point was the resurfaced evidence of the posthumous fate of the Sand Creek victims, almost literally Harjo’s ancestors.

"These five people were as much a part of the making of this museum as anyone living," she said.



The seed of the idea

Another decade and a half would elapse between the signing of the NMAI bill and the opening of the building on the Mall, but it took almost twice as long for the idea of the NMAI to grow into the legislation. Harjo remembered that the true origin of the idea was "a coalition which formed at Bear Butte in South Dakota in June 1967 and which began working on several things at the same time."

One of the offshoots began working on protection of sacred sites, "which is still going on," said Harjo. Another group talked about respect for human remains and sacred objects and protection of burial grounds. "At that time we still had lots and lots of dead Indians in museums," said Harjo, "and many of the remains were on display.
"We were talking about very, very specific things without putting it into sophisticated terms. We were talking about care and treatment of remains in museums. We were talking about repatriation, although we didn’t use that term until much later, and we were talking about developing public awareness through laws, developing public awareness through schools, museums and the like.

"We were talking about superior treatment and respect for Indians generally, living and dead, in society as a broad matter. And we were talking about a place that we were calling a center, where we would do these things in the right way."

One early result of this movement was passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978. In its aftermath, Harjo joined the administration of President Jimmy Carter to work on a Presidential report mandated by the act. "Through 1978 and ’79, we worked closely with the Defense Department museums.

"We came to an agreement that the Defense museums would return upon request Native American human remains, sacred objects and cultural patrimony. We tried to encourage the Smithsonian to reach that agreement as well. They balked. They said they weren’t part of the federal government. It was just hilarious, but we persuaded them to come along. So they had a weaker position than the Defense museums, as one would expect.

"At that time, no Secretary of the Smithsonian had met with a living Indian since the time of Lincoln, when Lincoln met with one of my ancestors, Lean Bear and Black Kettle and other Cheyenne chiefs to try to convince them not to take sides in the Civil War."



The accumulations of George Gustav Heye

With the end of the Carter administration in 1980, Harjo was out of government, but quickly found herself involved with the institution that would become the nucleus of the NMAI. "My friend, the great author Vine DeLoria asked me if I would go on the board of the Museum of the American Indian with him and our other top writer, Scott Momaday. And that was one way that working with a single museum and a single collection, we could enhance our national repatriation work and create a better museum. And that’s what we did."

The Museum of the American Indian at the time was a private foundation with a handsome building but an uptown Manhattan location off 125th Street where relatively few visitors ventured. It grew from the obsessive life-long collecting of the engineer and investment banker George Gustav Heye. A six-foot-four bull of a figure, incessantly smoking large cigars, Heye accumulated over a million Native objects from his first purchase of a deerskin shirt in Arizona in 1897 to his death in 1957. The Smithsonian Magazine acknowledges the ambiguity of his legacy. In spite of his voracious quest for even the most mundane remains, he seemed to have had little concern for contemporary Indian life. Yet he left behind the largest collection of Indian artifacts, from both North and South America, in the world.
Harjo said he would collect with a front-loader, scraping up whole villages and carting them back east in boxcars. By 1980, she said, his collection "was rotting in a warehouse in the Bronx, I mean literally falling apart.

"No one was interested, and we were trying to get someone in Washington or someone in New York or both, to show any interest at all. As part of the prudence of being trustees, we had to figure out whether we could keep the collection together and market it to someone, to salvage it, as well as getting help to do it another way."
After a trustees meeting, she recollected, she and Vine DeLoria Jr. were getting in a car with fellow trustees Charles Simon, a founder of the Salomon Brothers investment house and restaurateur Peter Kreindler, on their way to dinner at Kriendler’s "21 Club", when Simon said, "I have a crazy idea. What would you think if we started a bidding war, and have New York and Washington try to outbid each other for the museum?"

Fine, they replied, but how?

Simon replied that he had heard that H. Ross Perot, the Texas billionaire and later presidential candidate, wanted to found a world-class museum near Dallas and wasn’t particular about the class.
"We have a world-class collection," he said. "What would happen if we told him we wanted to put it on the block and wanted him to make a bid on it?"

Simon went to Perot with the explanation that they needed the bid to start the competition. "Bless his heart," Harjo said of Perot, "it had to be a serious bid, because he might wind up with it.

"Simon told him he could be the butt of a joke, and reported that Perot said, ‘What’s new?’"

The maneuver worked. "New York Mayor Edward Koch was on national television saying the collection was a New York treasure, and people in Texas weren’t going to take it away. People in Washington were saying that it was a national treasure, not just a New York treasure.
"So that was the point at which we actually had the makings of a deal."



Finding a home

The long and complicated negotiations that followed eventually found a three-part home for the National Museum of the American Indian, under the aegis of the Smithsonian Institution. New York City kept a hand in with the George Gustav Heye Center in the Old Custom House, a 1907 Beaux-Arts federal edifice next to Battery Park, a popular tourist destination at the foot of Manhattan. The Heye Center, in the first two floors of the building, opened Oct. 30, 1994. The bulk of the collection, 800,000 objects, headed to the Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Md. This facility, completed in 1998, provides conservation and research support as well as traditional ceremonies for sacred objects. And after complications worth a separate saga, the dramatic building on the Mall had its opening Sept. 21, asserting the Indian revival to the center of Washington.

Harjo recollected the many sides of the dealing that led to this arrangement. "There were lots of entities involved. There was New York City, New York state, about 10 different federal agencies. When we were talking about getting the Old Custom House in New York, we were also talking about getting a historic site, so every brick in front of the Custom House is protected by historic preservation. Every single site is protected or should be protected by New York state or city or a federal agency or all of them together. It was massive."

Importantly, Sen. Inouye and the staff of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee became personally involved. Harjo remembered the museum taking Inouye and Alan Parker, the committee chief of staff, to New York to review the collection. They toured the storage facility in the Bronx shortly after a flood. "The inventory index cards were laid out to dry, curled up like Fritos," said Harjo.

"After that trip, we were standing on the balcony at the Senator’s office in the Capitol," said Harjo, "and we were talking about places in Washington where we could showcase the Museum. We already had pretty much a lock on the Custom House, through David Rockefeller. We knew that we could locate a research center anywhere. We needed a place for the showpiece.

"Sen. Inouye hit on the solution while standing on the balcony of his hideaway office in the Capitol," said Harjo.

"He pointed to the space next to the National Air and Space Museum and said, ‘What’s that blank spot there on the Mall?" Parker, Harjo and Patricia Zell, now Inouye’s top staffer, researched the spot and found that it was dedicated to the Smithsonian, but not yet authorized for anything.

Inouye and the National Congress of American Indians mounted a campaign to secure the site. It had its grim side, but a light side, too. Harjo remembered putting together a skit for a banquet at the Air and Space Museum. "Our ‘Average Savage Review’ sang to Sec. Adams and other Smithsonian dignitaries, ‘Over there, over there, put the Indian Museum over there,’ pointing to the blank space that now houses the museum."

The museum campaign became inextricably entwined with the repatriation issue, when results came in from the Smithsonian’s inventory of human remains, said Harjo. "It worked out to be 18,500 Native American remains and 4,500 Indian skulls."

The skulls derived from the "Indian Cranial Study" ordered by U.S. Army Surgeons General in the 1860s and ’70s, in which soldiers in the field were instructed to "harvest" heads from Indian graves or battle casualties. This grisly research supposedly advanced the pseudo-science of phrenology, then in its heyday, but it left an embarrassing physical legacy, which the military turned over to the Smithsonian, and a folklore of horror, which haunts Indian people to the present day.

"It must have been one of the earliest things I heard as a child," said Harjo. "I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know about that.
"We all had oral histories of the beheadings of our people, but we didn’t have documentary evidence. The archival confessions were stunning.

"We deliberately married these issues," she said. "Repatriation agreement with the Smithsonian and an Indian museum to be built on the Mall, with these other pieces." The campaign drew strong support from editorial writers around the country and from Congress. By the time of Harjo’s final confrontation with Secretary Adams and the August 1989 reception in Santa Fe, the elements for the NMAI, the three locations and the repatriation agreement, were all in place for the final legislation.

The location on the Mall took on enormous symbolic significance. "It was the last place to be built," said NMAI Deputy Director Douglas Evelyn, "but it had primacy of place in relation to the Capitol." Harjo sees it as a constant reminder to the policy makers of Washington that the American Indian is here to stay.



An afterthought

Harjo recalled another symbolic encounter from that week in August 1989, subtler and more humbling. Immediately after the final deal and just as the story announcing it was going to press at the New York Times, Adams, Campbell, Echo-Hawk and Harjo had a celebratory dinner in Santa Fe. At Sec. Adams suggestion, they met at the Coyote Café in Santa Fe "which somehow made it all wonderful and laughable," she said, "because the Coyote is the Trickster who makes things happen in the right way.

"Just when we thought we had all done something marvelous, we were reminded that it was all being done, and we were just the instruments."

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