Smithsonian opens new American Indian museum

~ Smithsonian Magazine for The Associated Press

The Métis of western Canada know a thing or two about traveling. Descendants from Europeans and the native people they encountered while trading furs in the 18th century, the Métis and their culture were literally born on the move.

So it was in keeping with tradition that Jacinte Lambert, a Métis woman from the Saint-Laurent community on Lake Manitoba, climbed behind the wheel of a flatbed truck in the fall of 2003 and headed south with a most unusual cargo: a vintage 1950s Bombardier snow bus.

The ungainly "Bomber" is the workhorse of commercial ice fishing in the Manitoba, used by the Métis to ferry their catch of pickerel, perch and sauger from frozen lakes back to town. So when curators from the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian visited Saint-Laurent looking for objects to represent the Métis, the community decided to send a Bombardier.

On her 1,600-mile drive south with her husband to Washington, D.C., Lambert says, "Wherever we stopped, people kept coming up to us to look. I guess they didn't know what it was."

The Métis' snow bus is one of some 8,000 artifacts and artworks that are on display in the National Musem of the American Indian. The museum is 15 years in the making, and opened Tuesday on the National Mall.

The $199 million home of one of the most important collections of Native American art and artifacts in the world will display plenty of arrowheads, beadwork and pre-Columbian gold objects. But the museum will also exhibit items that speak in other ways to contemporary Indian experience.

Museum curators and officials spent years consulting with representatives of Indian tribes from throughout the Western Hemisphere, and among key recurring opinions, NMAI director W. Richard West Jr. says, "was the notion, a directive really, 'Don't you dare indicate that we are a historical relic."'

West told Smithsonian magazine for the September issue that "we are still here" was the message Native American political leaders, elders and communities most wanted the NMAI to get across to non-American Indian visitors.

Native people have long had a testy relationship with museums. "We love them because they have our stuff, but we also hate them because they have our stuff," West says.

Museums have typically treated American Indians as exotic curiosities. "The museums personified Western civilization, and Native Americans were outside of that, and often portrayed as quite subhuman," West says.

The NAMI's approach has made for some surprising exhibitions, like the Métis snow bus. Additionally, many of the ceremonial artifacts in the collection are considered to be "living objects," requiring light and air; so, unlike most museum storage facilities, the storage and archival areas have windows. And, because, according to tradition, some Pueblo pots need to be "fed" now and then, they will be offered a pinch of cornmeal, to the dismay of some conservators worried about rodents and insects.

The facility also serves as a place where people can use artifacts not created for display in traditional rituals. "They are coming out of the glass," West says. "We're trying to promote the original cultural context through interactions between the originators and the objects under our care."