A Place To Bring The Tribe

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In imitation of many Indian dwellings, the main entrance of the museum faces east, toward the rising sun — and also toward the nearby dome of the Capitol, headquarters of the Great White Fathers who repeatedly authorized the theft of Indian lands but who also provided about $120 million of the museum's $219 million price tag. (The remainder came from private funding, a third of it contributed by Indian tribes.) Inside and out there are passages in this building good enough to bear comparison to the suavely rippling walls of Alvar Aalto, the great Finnish apostle of forms derived from nature. They bring to mind even more strongly the work of Douglas Cardinal, architect of the lyrical swells of the Canadian Museum of Civilization near Ottawa. It was Cardinal, a Blackfoot, who won the original commission in 1993 to design the American Indian museum, in affiliation with other architects, only to be dismissed from the project five years later in a bitter dispute over deadlines. A number of other firms and consultants were eventually brought in to revise and complete Cardinal's scheme, but in its essential outlines the museum still bears his stamp, which is why, for all the turmoil of the design process, it's a superior addition to a mall that has more than its share of Bureaucratic Modern.

As for what's inside, when the visitors start flowing in — the museum expects 4 million a year — they may be surprised by what they find. This is not a museum truly devoted to artifacts from the past, though it has plenty of them. It's not even much devoted to historical summary at all. You will search in vain for one of those wall-size timelines or for prominent wall texts on Little Big Horn or Chief Joseph. The people behind this place have decided to tell the story a little differently.

The major display areas are divided into three themes. "Our Universes" is about different forms of tribal knowledge, cosmologies and creation myths. "Our Peoples" deals with events that Native Americans see as crucial to their histories, like the establishment of the U.S.-Mexican border that abruptly divided Southwest desert tribes. "Our Lives" offers scenes and artwork from contemporary life, in which running shoes have replaced moccasins, in a world where some Indians live on reservations, some live in rainforests and quite a few live in Chicago. In each of the three sections, there are smaller display areas. Each one is devoted to one of 24 tribes, whose members present relevant experiences of tribal life. The exhibitions in these areas will be regularly rotated, a way of eventually representing many of the hundreds of tribes across two continents.

"It's not just a question of objects," says W. Richard West Jr., the museum's director, a Southern Cheyenne. "Native people don't see their own world in ethnographic terms." They also aren't interested in presenting their heritage as so many delectable glass-case curiosities or in having their history understood chiefly through the lens of their centuries of struggle with European settlers, however crucial that event may be. It's a history, after all, that begins some 10,000 years before the white man arrived and extends into the age of hip-hop and the Internet. "There was a tremendous 'before,'" says West, meaning before 1492. "There will be a tremendous 'after.'"