Covering Indian Country Blog

The People, The Culture

Understanding Cultures, Hearing Their Stories

The National Museum of the American Indian, which opened last September, spent more than five years working with community members to ensure that the exhibits were told from their point of view.  For too long, others had determined what was their history and this was their chance to tell their story.  In the “Our Universe” exhibits, staff checked in with selected communities throughout the process, visiting them in their homelands, and flying them to the museum.  It was up to each group to decide what items would be displayed.

But does respecting these perspectives sometimes lead to meaning lost on museum visitors?  For example, in the “Our Universe” gallery, which highlights Native American philosophies, there are four lines in the floor. What do the lines mean, we asked our cultural interpreter.  The four seasons, he replied.  The exhibit in-between each line represented a time of year, such as the Denver pow-wow in the spring.

Given the importance of the seasons in many native cultures, that seemed an important point to make yet that connotation could be lost on many visitors.  Our guide then said that in Indian culture, answers aren’t always immediately apparent.  You have to ask.

And in the museum’s soaring atrium, prisms cast a rainbow up the wall and to the top of the dome on the solstice, underscoring how important those dates are to many native cultures.  Again, there was no written explanation.

Over dinner, our group talked about this philosophy as an organizing principal for a museum. It was pointed out that iconography is not entirely explained in places like the Vatican.  And in poetry, spelling out the meaning is not artful.  The paraphrased prose is flat compared to the poetry.  But museums are meant to inform the public and does being subtle or coy in delivery, serve that purpose?

As journalists, perhaps we’re more curious about the “why.” Visitors may be still enriched at the museum, though they may not understand all the significance.  Understanding another culture is never easy, no matter how much you know.

--Vanessa Hua, San Francisco Chronicle

Posted on 03.09.05 at 1:36 AM by Victor Merina