No campy "Indian" extras of Westerns, nor wooden cigar-store Indians, nor Sitting Bull comedy kitsch. There will be no display of suction-cup toy arrows, no headdresses made in Taiwan. No tepee-shaped motels or Route 66 curios, and no sexy depictions of buckskin-bikini-clad maidens, nor Land o' Lakes butter princesses.
Sorry, die-hard Redskins fans: Your long struggle to justify the NFL franchise's name isn't a welcome discussion here. Same for the "tomahawk chop" of the Atlanta Braves, or the Cleveland Indians' cartoony Chief Wahoo, or any of a panoply of outdated team mascots and their war-painted fans.
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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There is no Disney afoot. (Nix the 1990s-style "Pocahontas," and also "Peter Pan's" Tiger Lily and the Lost Boys.) No gift-shop tom-toms with rubber skins. No Thanksgiving pageants with the clumsy gesturing, the corn cobs, the loincloths. No Hallmark depictions of a "vanishing people." No guy on horseback shedding a glycerin tear at the sight of litter and pollution. No Village People. No "how." No new-age medicine men who populate the Santa Fe spa scene. Thus far, just a few references to casino culture. None of the Indian art typically seen in the dentist offices of Phoenix. No "Little Big Man," nor any Kevin Costner-style Hollywood guilt (which, to many Indians, is no better than the Hollywood exploitation that preceded it). No Ethel Merman singing Irving Berlin's "I'm an Indian Too" from "Annie Get Your Gun":
Just like Rising Moon, Falling Pants, Running Nose
Like those Indians, I'm an Indian, too.
A Siou-ouuu-oux, a Sioux
Let go, the Indian Museum implicitly tells us. That stuff -- though very much a hot topic and desperately interesting to those seeking to understand the effective marginalizing of native culture in the modern age -- isn't here.
But should it be? Has the Smithsonian -- obsessive-compulsive hoarder of everything American -- amassed a collection of Indian kitsch somewhere, anything akin to George Gustav Heye's collection of authentic Indian artifacts in the 19th and early 20th century? Yes, at some future point, Bernstein says, the Indian Museum will figure out how examples of negative Indian stereotypes fit in with the theme and vision of the place.
Bernstein points out that the Smithsonian and other museums have been attuned all along to showing the artistic and cultural uses of inaccuracies and issues of race. The NMAI approaches it tentatively for now -- Santa Clara (N.M.) Pueblo potter Tammy Garcia has a piece in the Indian Museum called "Love and Luggage" that depicts a relationship between an Indian man and a blond, white woman. "Who Stole the Tee Pee?," a 2000 exhibit at the Smithsonian's Heye Center in New York, examined Indian stereotypes from dozens of native perspectives, and the results were both clever and chilling.
"The problem with the predominate Indian stereotypes are that they totally ignore the diversity, the modernity of native people," says Kathleen Ash-Milby, curator and co-director of the gallery at the American Indian Community House in New York.
That said, Ash-Milby thinks stereotypes are a fascinating and key element to the overall American Indian narrative. When she was a graduate student at the University of New Mexico in the early 1990s, Ash-Milby did thesis work on the perennially iconic, cliche image of Indianness -- the war bonnet. Emanating from Plains cultures, the bonnet took on outsize significance and became misunderstood, misused. It helped turn "Indian" into a Halloween costume.
"I think it's important that the stereotypes are addressed at some point," she says. Ash-Milby, who is Navajo, found herself having to explain to her son's preschool teacher -- who was originally from Ecuador -- why it wasn't appropriate to sing "Ten Little Indians" in class (and do the "woo-woo-woo" war cry at the end of the song). "I know she didn't mean harm by it," she says. "But I had to tell her that . . . if my son were to sing this song in front of his family, it would hurt their feelings."
Robert Schmidt, a writer in Los Angeles who started his own Indian-themed comic book ("Peace Party") several years ago and has been an ardent compiler of examples of negative stereotypes, says he thinks it's "useful for [the NMAI] to send a positive message and their approach implicitly contradicts stereotypes, but at some point I'd hope [the museum] would explicitly contradict stereotypes."
Since 1998, Schmidt has clipped and posted examples on his Web site (www.bluecorncomics.com) of past and current Indian stereotypes -- everything from the choice moment of a "Brady Bunch" rerun quoted earlier, to longer, more harmful instances of politicians and otherwise gallant-seeming intellectuals partaking in both subtle and overt digs at Indian cultures. Some of it is so baffling, so trivializing, that you laugh more out of exasperation than remorse.
Even some American Indians find it hard to let go of Tonto et al.
"You know, it's disappointing for native people, too," Ash-Milby says, "to find out that these stereotypes aren't true." Some of them anyhow -- like the heroic Indian guide, the nobility, the spirituality. Even when it was wildly inaccurate, it was at least an acknowledgment of existence, something minorities were never used to seeing in most popular culture.
"People want to believe these romantic notions, which are prevalent and longstanding. Our people grew up with mass media, too," she says, and that meant they saw the same kind of faux-Indian and, taking what they could get, identified with him. "Pop culture has a very strong influence."
In a stand-up concert taped earlier this year in San Francisco and currently airing on Showtime, the comedian Dave Chappelle performs a shtick in which he claims to have met a Navajo man in a Wal-Mart in New Mexico. "You know who I feel sorry for," Chappelle says, "is Indians. They get dogged openly, because everyone thinks they're all dead."
He continues the bit: To make sure his new friend, "Running Coyote," is an Indian, he says, he throws a gum wrapper on the floor, waiting for Running Coyote (an alcoholic, he jokes) to shed a single tear, like the public service anti-litter ad in the early 1970s. Calling himself "Black Feet," Chappelle imagines a riff of accompanying Running Coyote to a marijuana peace-pipe ritual. It goes on and on, dragging out almost every Indian stereotype of the last 100 years. (And making use of the implicit contract all minority comedians have with the mores of pop culture: Anything goes, but it's okay, because I'm black.)
What's instructive here is how heartily the racially mixed audience laughs.
Are these the same people coming to the Indian Museum? Ostensibly yes, in an America that hasn't stopped dogging Tonto.
