Exploring Native American Life at D.C. Museum

The crackly remains of harvested corn in a garden plot, a tumbling waterfall and the huge grandfather rock signal to visitors they’re approaching Indian country. Right in the center of Washington, D.C.

Even the grounds and building of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) on the National Mall are exhibitions. Native Americans were involved in every aspect of creating the museum, from its design and exhibits to heading up and staffing it. After 15 years of planning and building, the Smithsonian Institute’s NMAI opened in September 2004. Donna House, the Navajo and Oneida botanist who supervised the landscaping, said, “The landscape flows into the building, and the environment is who we are. We are the trees, we are the rocks, we are the water. And that had to be part of the museum.” This theme of organic flow continues inside the museum, too, with its curving walls, open space and outdoor colors.

Preserving Culture

Several Virginia tribes are represented among the many exhibitions in the museum, including the Pamunkey and Algonquin. The Pamunkey are among the first tribes to be featured in the “Our Lives: Contemporary Life and Identities” section of the museum, which explores how native peoples have survived through the choices that have brought them into the 21st century. Smithsonian researchers were intrigued with how the tribe maintains age-old traditions against the onslaught of modernity. The Pamunkey—descendants of Pocahontas and her father, Chief Powhatan—live today on a 1,200-acre reservation between Richmond and Williamsburg. The exhibit focuses on the river, which was photographed in every season as tribe members worked and played around its waters. Curators videotaped the Indians digging clay for pottery, milking eggs from shad and boating down the Pamunkey River. Every year, the tribe’s chief, whose Indian name is Swift Water, dons his deerskin and headdress to present venison or turkey to Virginia’s governor at Thanksgiving.

Even Food is Native

Artifacts come alive at NMAI with films, music and interactive screens. American Indian tour guides and staff members welcome questions and conversation about their tribe’s history, customs and modern life. The menu at the Mitsitam Café offers native foods from each of the five regions in the Western Hemisphere. There’s quahog clam chowder (Northern Woodlands), Peruvian potato causa (South America), smoked seafood platter (Northwest Coast), pumpkin cookies (Meso America) and buffalo chili with pinto beans on fry bread (Great Plains). The menus change seasonally. A fire pit in the café’s kitchen allows visitors to watch the staff cook such foods as the cedar-planked juniper salmon.

Fact, Not Fiction

Other permanent exhibitions at NMAI are “Our Universes: Traditional Knowledge Shapes Our World,” which explores native cosmology and the spiritual relationship between mankind and the natural world, and “Our Peoples: Giving Voice to Our Histories,” in which American Indians attempt to correct misconceptions about them by telling their own histories.

The native peoples of the Chesapeake Bay region—what is now Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and Washington, D.C.—are the subject of a temporary exhibition, “Return to a Native Place: Algonquin Peoples of the Chesapeake.” Through photos, maps, ceremonial and everyday objects, the exhibit seeks to educate visitors about the historical and continued native presence in the region.

Nov. 1 marks the opening of a new exhibit, “Franz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian,” featuring many of the revolutionary paintings of Native Americans for which the artist was famous. The art exhibit runs through August 2009. v