Terminology is important at the museum because those who run it are interpreting their collection for two audiences. They need to be sensitive to the concerns of the Native Americans whose heritage they house, and they must also cater to the many non-native people who come through, who may have a hard time understanding how -- from a Native American perspective -- cultural and spiritual interests are interwoven.
The Smithsonian's acquisition of the Heye collection was authorized in 1989. During the more than four years it took to ship those artifacts from a storehouse in the Bronx to the museum's Suitland facility, each truck was blessed upon its departure and arrival. There have been blessings marking major moments in the museum's life: upon its groundbreaking, upon the placement of the final steel beam in its dome. The Cultural Resources Center has a fire pit where visiting tribes can perform smudging ceremonies.
George Horse Capture, a senior curator at the American Indian museum, with a painting of the God of Thunder from a chief's house on Vancouver Island.
(Katherine Frey -- The Washington Post)
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But Pepper Henry says he worries that the museum might be perceived as "New Agey." Referring to a specific blessing ceremony, Thomas Sweeney, the museum's spokesman, labels it a "cultural, not a religious rite." For some American Indians, that distinction may be a false one, but it underlines the thorny path their museum must navigate.
It is easy, perhaps too easy, to view American Indian ideas about powerful objects as outside mainstream Western beliefs. The way some scholars tell it, once upon a time, Europeans assigned objects a sacred quality. Over time, various forces interceded, according to different theories. The Reformation deemphasized the power of the religious image. In art, aesthetics became more important than devotion -- the actual worship of icons of the Virgin Mary declined. Modern science and faith in the scientific method put the notion of the supernatural under a microscope.
In non-native culture, there are few items considered so holy, so forbidden, that they cannot even be looked at, says David Freedberg, a professor of art history at Columbia University who wrote "The Power of Images" in 1989. "There's certainly nothing like the kind of sacredness and inviolate aura which is attached to medicine bundles," he says.
But there are religious symbols that maintain their power: crosses, relics, altars. There is our national flag, a secular object with such totemic power that there is substantive debate over whether it should be illegal to burn what is, in fact, a piece of cloth. The Great Pyramid has a magical quality that surpasses its bigness, its oldness, its ingenuity. Certainly, a secular object like the flag is not the same as kachina masks to the devout. But there is a common human reality here. It has to do with reverence.
Freedberg argues that images still have the power to arouse and anger us. It is human nature to "conflate the image with what it represents," he says.
Thus, spurned lovers rip up the pictures of those who betrayed them. In 2001 the Taliban destroyed statues of Buddha in the Afghan desert. Last year Iraqis and U.S. Marines toppled that statue of Saddam Hussein. Some anthropologists argue there are hard-wired reasons we look for faces in tree bark, that we see a man in the moon. We imbue inanimate objects with an animate quality -- a spirit, if you will.
We love our inanimate objects. We believe in them. Our cars make us powerful. Our clothing makes us desirable. Margaret Wiener, a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, suggests that maybe Karl Marx had it right when he spoke of the fetishism of commodities.
"We're enmeshed in objects," she says. "What is consumerism but a vast set of practices that treats objects as highly significant, highly powerful to the making of ourselves?"
Defining Sacredness
Back to words again. Sticky words like object and church and own. This time, the word is sacred.
The most recent and public difference of opinion over sacredness occurred just this summer, and it concerned a substance called pipestone. Also known as catlinite, this stone is used by Plains and other Indians to carve ceremonial pipes. The pipes are considered so powerful that when they're put on display in the museum their pieces are separated.
"The stem represents the male and the bowl represents the female," says Arvol Looking Horse, a Lakota spiritual leader who lives on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. When "they're put together, they're starting life."
A few months ago, the museum installed a small circle of the red stone in the floor by the main entrance. The idea, says Richard West, was to lend importance to a central location by using a material that is both beautiful and revered. It was meant to evoke a fire pit, the center of family and communal life.
When word got out that the stone was being used in this unorthodox fashion, West started receiving complaints. Looking Horse is one of those who objected. He says that according to legend, pipestone was formed by the blood of ancestors. It is too sacred to be sold and too sacred to be placed in the floor.
"You can't walk over or on sacred things," says Looking Horse. "It's totally disrespectful."
But Travis Erickson, a Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota stoneworker who carved the floor installation, sees sacredness in different terms. "This is how I survive and support my children," says Erickson, who has eight kids and lives in Pipestone, Minn. The fourth generation of his family to sell or trade pipestone, he prays before he begins his quarrying work, and treats the stone with respect.
"My family, in my mind," he says, "is a sacred thing, because God gave me these children."
The pipestone from the floor is now in storage, and the hole in the museum's floor has been filled with sandstone. It is the same sandstone that was used in the Smithsonian castle, West says. This seems appropriate. In some sense, it is the Smithsonian's sacred stone.
"This is complicated business," says West, who himself uses a pipestone pipe during ceremonies. "The National Museum of the American Indian is essentially a constituency-driven organization." West says such disputes will happen from time to time.
"One is inevitably going to have differences of opinion," he says. "We are only human in the end."
