National Museum of the American Indian
Quote of note:
Quite poetically, what Heye collected as artifacts of a fading culture are about to be displayed instead as evidence of tribal resilience across 10,000 years in the Western Hemisphere. There now are about two million Indians in the United States, an eightfold rebound from the low point of tribal decimation after the Indian wars.
The American Tribes Prepare Their National Showcase
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
WASHINGTON
The word Potomac means "where the goods are brought in" and it dates from the local Indian tribe rudely displaced here centuries ago by colonial whites intent on a New World. The word seems perfect for the whiff of irony and history in the air this month as the last of 800,000 Indian artifacts — priceless goods, in fact — were trucked in from New York City to become the bedrock treasure of the new National Museum of the American Indian.
Even incomplete, the museum stands as a modernistic cynosure, defiantly staring down its immediate neighbor, the gleaming white Capitol, where so many treaty promises to American Indians were written and broken. The museum marks a grand turning point in that history, a sacred federal site ceded to Indian management and broadcasting a message of hardy survival, not tribal extinction, to throngs of tourists.
The museum — a 10-story, cantilevered edifice suggesting a mesa with a cascading brook, indigenous landscaping (from corn bed to marshland), and a cladding of desert-toned Kasota limestone — opens in September and is likely to be the last Smithsonian attraction built on the National Mall. It will offer a kaleidoscopic sampling of stories from hundreds of tribes that were consulted from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego.
Mad cool.
Now where's my Slavery Museum?
LATER: Deb at Debwire answers!
