Page 134 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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branch museum of the Smithsonian, opened its new building on the National
Mall in Washington DC in 2004. It is an enormous and prestigious institution,
which has cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and is the result of lengthy
negotiations regarding the reinvention of the Museum of the American Indian
in Manhattan, owned by the Heye’s Foundation. The Museum of the American
Indian showed the culture of the colonized from the perspective of the colon-
izers, and its huge collections were objects acquired, often forcibly, from Native
American tribes. While Canadian museums returned the Kwagiulth items in
their collections, this museum kept hold of the 33 items they had from the
Kwagiulth potlatch.
However, in 1989 the NMAI was established and set about ‘beginning to
integrate Native world views into standard museum practices’ including both
‘behind the scenes’ and display practices (Rosoff 2003: 72). By the time I visited
the museum in the mid-1990s, the displays did incorporate tribal perspectives.
In some exhibits, video and audio technologies were used to provide explan-
ation of the artefacts by the peoples who had produced and originally owned
them, and the history of the forcible imposition of European culture was
explicitly addressed. Native Americans seemed to be representing their own
history and cultures. The new NMAI is a celebration of indigenous culture
intended to be authored by its ‘stakeholders’ – with Native American curators
and director, and made in close consultation with tribal communities. The
museum deliberately excludes the colonial perspective that had previously
shaped all museum representations of the first peoples of North America. Politi-
cally it can be read as a great coup, since it geographically locates indigenous
culture at the symbolic centre of the nation-state. However, as Clifford suggests,
this strategy is also associated with a liberal pluralist politics, which incorpor-
ates or integrates Native Americans without disturbing the larger structures of
the nation-state and the museum (against this he advocates decentralized and
multiple contact zones; Clifford 1997: 214).
For some, the NMAI does disturb the ‘museum idea’. For instance, in a recent
newspaper article, Tiffany Jenkins (2005) criticizes the new museum in the Mall
for restricting access and research ‘on the basis of birth and background’ and by
turning the secular institution into an ‘establishment of worship’. Jenkins
accepts the traditional museum claims to universality, and sees the NMAI as a
threat to that. She wants to defend the secular and democratic institution of the
Western museum. Yet interestingly, the aspects of the museum that she points to
(the restricted access given to women and non-Native people) can also be read
as symptomatic of an ideology about ‘traditional cultures’ which is deeply
rooted in the institution of the museum. I will argue that, inadvertently,
Jenkins’ account, and other accounts closer to the museum, suggest that the
NMAI risks reinforcing conservative notions about indigenous cultures.