Where Myth and Museums Meet

From the beginning I heard the refrain: different, different, different, different.

Assigned last winter to report on the National Museum of the American Indian, which will open its new home on the Mall this Tuesday, I was immediately informed by NMAI officials that it would be different from other museums, including its Smithsonian neighbors. It would be different because it would be infused with a Native American sensibility, inside and out. It would be different because it would concentrate on living people and cultures, not the dead past. Most of all, it would be different because Indians themselves -- not some non-native cultural authority -- would be in charge of the stories it told.

Even the food would be different. Want McDonald's rather than authentic native cuisine? You'll have to head next door to the National Air and Space Museum.

Maybe it was that fleeting mention of Air and Space, where I'd done some reporting as well, but one day I found myself thinking: Never mind the differences. What is it that those side-by-side Smithsonian museums have in common?

The answer is a lot more important than buffalo burgers and Big Macs. And it goes to the heart of the question of what we want our museums to be.

At first, any comparison may seem far-fetched. Walk through Air and Space and you'll find yourself craning your neck to ogle the incredible flying machines engineered by Technological Man: the Spirit of St. Louis, the Skylab orbital workshop, an array of sleekly lethal ICBMs. Stroll a couple of hundred yards down the Mall and you'll be admiring such close-to-the-Earth artifacts as a wall of pre-Columbian figurines and a pair of lovingly beaded sneakers, not to mention innumerable displays that feature living, thriving Native Americans. (The main message of the new museum can be summed up in three words: We're still here.)

But the crucial connection between the Indian Museum and Air and Space isn't visible on the museums' floors. It lies in the fact that each is beholden to a particular set of influential "stakeholders" whose worldview frames its presentations. Each museum, as a result -- despite the Smithsonian's historic commitment to the straightforward "increase and diffusion of knowledge" -- is open to the charge that the knowledge it is diffusing may be skewed.

The Indian Museum is acutely conscious of this potential criticism. Founding director W. Richard West Jr. has said repeatedly that his institution has "complete respect" for the anthropological, archaeological and historical approaches to the study of native peoples that he and his stakeholders are rejecting. NMAI, he says, is simply adding to these approaches "the voices of native peoples themselves." In an introduction to its permanent historical exhibition, the museum specifically acknowledges that "like all other makers of history, it has a point of view, an agenda." In this case, it is to let previously unheard voices be heard.

Air and Space has a different kind of stakeholder problem. The fact that it has stakeholders isn't a particular source of controversy, though perhaps it should be. The museum got badly burned, a decade ago, when it took on an explosive topic that drew stakeholder fire.

The National Air Museum was created by Congress in 1946 to, among other things, "memorialize the national development of aviation." Its godfather was Gen. Henry H. "Hap" Arnold, who'd commanded the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II. Thirty years later -- with the exploration of space added to its name and portfolio -- it opened what amounted to a grand showcase for NASA, the military services and the aerospace industry on the National Mall.

Not long after this, however, curators at other Smithsonian museums began presenting exhibits that raised historical questions rather than just celebrating historic accomplishments. Air and Space was behind the curve but, by the early 1990s, it was trying hard to catch up. To that end, it decided to develop a question-raising exhibition of its own.

One version of what happened next runs as follows:

A bunch of "revisionist" Smithsonian curators planned to exhibit the Enola Gay -- the famous B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima -- as part of a show that questioned, among other things, the necessity of dropping the bomb in the first place. Alerted by a veterans' group called the Air Force Association, an outraged press and public rose up and caused the exhibition to be canceled. And why not? As some members of Congress put it in a letter to Smithsonian management, the bombing was "one of the most morally unambiguous events of the 20th century."

An alternate version goes like this: