National Museum of the American Indian
The National Museum of the American Indian is a museum in the United States devoted to the culture of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. It is part of the Smithsonian Institution group of museums and research centers.[2]
Established
1989
Fourth Street and Independence Avenue, Southwest, Washington D.C. (main location)
1.2 million (2017)[1]
Cynthia Chavez Lamar
Federal Center SW (main location)
The museum has three facilities. The National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., opened on September 21, 2004, on Fourth Street and Independence Avenue, Southwest. The George Gustav Heye Center, a permanent museum, is located at the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House in New York City, opened in October 1994. The Cultural Resources Center, a research and collections facility, is located in Suitland, Maryland. The foundations for the present collections were first assembled in the former Museum of the American Indian in New York City, which was established in 1916, and which became part of the Smithsonian in 1989.
Exhibits[edit]
Nation to Nation: Treaties[edit]
In 2014 NMAI opened a new exhibition Nation to Nation: Treaties, curated by Indian rights activist Suzan Shown Harjo.[40] The exhibit is built around the Two Row Wampum Treaty, known from both Indian oral tradition and a written document that some believe is a modern forgery.[41][42][43][44] Museum reviewer Diana Muir Appelbaum has said, "There is no evidence that there ever was a 1613 treaty" and describes NMAI as "a museum that peddles fairy tales."[44]
Editor-in-Chief
Tanya Thrasher
quarterly
42,640
Smithsonian Institution
2000
US
Reception[edit]
The National Museum of the American Indian indigenous-focused curatorial strategy has been criticized by visitors expecting to see the same depictions that traditional museums present. Two Washington Post writers, Fisher and Richard, expressed "irritation and frustration at the cognitive dissonance they experienced once inside the museum".[46] For Fisher, the displays did not meet his expectations that they would tell the familiar story of Indians' evolution from prehistory to modern times. Richards, who had a similarly negative assessment of the NMAI, questioned whether the broad array of Indian identities and individuals depicted in the exhibit really qualified as Indians.[46]
Jacki Thompson Rand, a Choctaw historian who served on the advisory board up to 1994, titled her reflections Why I Can't Visit the National Museum of the American Indian: "The absence of Native knowledge and the consequent inability to effect the required translation undermined exhibitions … Art and material culture were the preferred media for transferring knowledge about Native America to an unknowing audience. Why art and culture? … This meant, astonishingly, no treatment of the history of genocide and colonialism, then and now, or even of the basis of tribal sovereignty."[47]
Edward Rothstein described the NMAI as an "identity museum" that "jettisons Western scholarship and tells its own story, leading one tribe to solemnly describe its earliest historical milestone: "Birds teach people to call for rain".[48]
The museum had 2.4 million visitors in the year it opened. In 2014 it averaged 1.4 million visitors.
