Bobby (angry that his stepsister Cindy is wearing his Indian costume): I'm gonna scalp her. I'm the real Little Owl!
Alice, the housekeeper: Oh, I think she makes a heap pretty squaw.
Tammy Garcia's sculpture "Love and Luggage," above, is one of the few pieces in the Indian Museum that deal with stereotypes. But elsewhere, examples abound, including fans at a Cleveland Indians game, the Redskins logo, the "Crying Indian" of anti-litter fame and Disney's "Pocahontas."
(Walter Larrimore -- National Museum Of The American Indian)
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-- From a 1969 episode of "The Brady Bunch"
One problem facing the National Museum of the American Indian is that there's too much "Brady Bunch" in most of us. Whether in backyard forts or on trips to the Grand Canyon, the Brady family had a pretty strong case, as do many Americans, of what academic circles have dubbed "the Tonto Syndrome." Centuries of exaggerated, romanticized media imagery have created an Indian of the mind.
Bad accents, bad jokes: Americans still revel in war whoops and feathers.
Tonto -- that faithful, if verbally stilted, companion to TV's Lone Ranger -- is who stands between the new museum's vision of itself and everyone else. He is one of countless make-believe natives who are both icons of pop and a pernicious stereotype. The faux Indian dates from Plains Indians' successful (if culturally disastrous) showbiz debut with Buffalo Bill in the 19th century. He is with us even up to the performance of "Hey Ya!" by hip-hop megastars OutKast at this year's Grammy Awards. (The band wore face paint and cheesy feathered headdresses. Indian rights groups complained, noting parallels to minstrelsy. And got nowhere.)
Everything you think you know about Indians? It's probably wrong.
But is it so wrong that it won't be in the museum at all?
When Mr. and Mrs. Air-'n'-Space and their kids walk through its hallowed entry, they bring to the Indian Museum a few centuries' worth of red-man baggage. (They might even be wearing Redskins jerseys.) But the museum, in giving them a heavy dose of authenticity, doesn't include a place to unpack all those heap-big stereotypes -- the residue of racism that has so transfixed contemporary Indian artists, cultural historians and ironic observers of outdated pop.
What the museum serves is an altogether new flavor of tourist Kool-Aid, redefining concepts of history, cosmology, spirituality and diversity. It is so broad and so complicated that visitors almost can't be blamed for asking, in ignorance or sentimentality, where Tonto went.
"We have consistently thought about that question, all along," says Bruce Bernstein, the museum's assistant director for cultural resources.
Bernstein and others hope the sheer beauty and tone of the place will dispel the inaccurate mythology, jokes and war whoops that visitors grew up with. That basically includes anyone who watched TV or had a social studies class in the 20th century.
"You walk in on the northwest corner and into what I hope people will agree is a gorgeous building," Bernstein says. "And they won't be saying, 'Wait, now where are the tepees?' or 'I don't see the noble savage standing around; what does this have to do with native people?' We're trying to call all that into question with what we do show."
Therefore, no funny stuff.
