By Fern Shen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 20, 2000; Page A1

Check out the big mural on the fifth floor, a friend told Myrna Mooney one day last August, shortly after Mooney and fellow employees of the Environmental Protection Agency moved into new headquarters in the Federal Triangle complex. A Native American from the Blackfeet Nation in Montana, Mooney was "flabbergasted" by what she saw:

Splashed across a 13-foot-wide canvas in the Ariel Rios Building was a graphic scene of Indians attacking and scalping white people. Called "Dangers of the Mail," the 1930s-era painting included half a dozen naked white women being assaulted by Indians and an Indian stabbing a white man in the back.

"It portrays Indians as cowardly. It's an insult," said Mooney. "When you come from the reservation, these kinds of images make you physically ill."

Mooney and a dozen other Native Americans soon complained. Earlier this month, after hours of meetings, allegations of censorship and racism, and talk of a lawsuit, EPA officials quietly circulated a memo saying that the mural, and a similar one elsewhere in the building, would be covered up with temporary displays. The memo added that EPA would push for "removing [the murals] from public view" and would formally ask its landlord, the General Services Administration, to do so.

But GSA officials said last week that the murals are an integral part of the historic building that should remain on public display-with a better explanation of their historical context.

That puts "Dangers of the Mail" at the center of a thorny debate that has dogged public art in the United States for decades-which version of American history should our public buildings tell? The heroic view of the government opening up the West and forging the new nation is precisely what led to the genocide of American Indians, say the EPA's Native American workers.

The GSA's position is that it can remove the murals' sting with signs and brochures explaining how the nation saw itself at the time the art was made for a building that was originally U.S. Post Office headquarters.

"Delivering the mail was symbolic of democracy and the growth of the young nation and bringing communities together," said Tony Costa, GSA's head of public buildings for the National Capital Region. "So anything that would impede that was a grave threat."

"GSA talks about the need to understand the mural in context, but how could we do that?" said Bob Smith, an Oneida who works for the EPA. "Would you put up a big scene from Wounded Knee or Sand Creek?" he said, citing two infamous massacres in which hundreds of Indians were killed.

The controversy also highlights Indian leaders' frustration that they are still battling over cultural stereotypes that other minorities have long ago pushed beyond the fringes of acceptability.

"If you had scenes of African American men killing white women, you'd have a hostile workplace issue," said Judith Lee, a Washington attorney and member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, who is representing the EPA workers. "Everyone would see that."

"The images in these murals should have gone the way of lawn jockeys and segregated lunch counters and the Frito Bandito," said Vernon Bellecourt, a Chippewa who heads the National Coalition on Racism in Sports and Media.

The debate over how to portray history is especially acute in Washington, where government buildings must both symbolize a nation and house the people who run it. Previous clashes over art have resulted in mixed outcomes.

In 1995, complaints from black Library of Congress employees shut down an exhibit on slavery. The workers, who were in the midst of a discrimination lawsuit, called the show offensive. It was shown instead at the Martin Luther King Memorial Library.

Just a few years earlier, in 1991, the National Museum of American Art set off a huge backlash with a show called "The West as America." It displayed classic art of the Old West-cowboys, Indians, settlers-with lengthy texts deconstructing what it characterized as racist and capitalist assumptions. It was attacked by right-leaning columnists and Western states' congressmen as unfairly negative. Some of the text was later altered and although the show ran its full length in Washington, several cities' museums canceled plans to host the exhibit.

In other parts of the country, too, the issue has been a hot button. Another mural from the 1930s called "Peoples of the World," which included blacks carrying spears and wearing loincloths, was removed from an Oak Park, Ill., elementary school in 1995 because African American parents thought it was a negative stereotype.

On the other hand, in 1941, African Americans protested a St. Joseph, Mo., post office mural, "Negro River Music." It portrays blacks as "a lazy people with no other thoughts but singing, dancing and clowning," a pastor complained. The mural was left untouched.

In 1968, black students protested and defaced a WPA mural from the 1930s in the library of Evander Childs High School in the Bronx. It includes a section on American labor, including cotton picking. Although a biracial committee met to discuss it and the principal covered it with a green drape, it is still there today.

The debate over these controversial works of art "gets right to a huge question: 'How do you make art in a democracy?'‚" said Karal Ann Marling of the University of Minnesota, who put "Dangers of the Mail" on the cover of her 1982 book "Wall-to-Wall America: A Cultural History of Post-Office Murals in the Great Depression."

Damsels in Distress

Between 1934 and 1943, the Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture commissioned art for federal buildings and 1,100 post offices around the country. Its theory, and that of similar programs like the Works Progress Administration, was that people struggling though the Great Depression needed cultural, not just material, support.

"Dangers of the Mail" by Colorado artist Frank Albert Mechau and "Attack on a Covered Wagon," on the seventh floor, by William C. Palmer, are two of many 1930s-era government-sponsored murals in the Ariel Rios building.

After the EPA moved in, the Indian murals drew complaints from female staffers and many of the approximately 50 Native American EPA employees who work in Washington (about a dozen of them at Ariel Rios). One image especially disturbed both groups-the naked woman down on all fours, a barely clothed Indian man standing over her, grasping her hair and yanking back her head.

"That so much plays into the stereotype of the sexually violent savage. He's going to either rape her or scalp her or both," said Lee.

The painting revives a time-honored trope in Western art, expressing a grand moment of history by showing nubile damsels imperiled by an alien aggressor. But instead of Romans, as in Reubens's "Rape of the Sabine Women," Mechau uses Indians.

When the concerns first reached EPA officials, they held meetings to air complaints but made it clear that the murals would most likely not be moved. Because Ariel Rios is a historic building, it-and all the art in it-is protected under the National Historic Preservation Act, they said.

In addition, EPA officials said preservationists had told them that the murals, painted on thin and fragile canvas, would be difficult to take off the walls.

In August, Administrator Carol M. Browner told employees in a memo that while she understood some staffers' "anxiety" over the art, they should try to understand the works in context. She suggested brown-bag lunches to generate a dialogue, which was taken as dismissive by the protesting employees. Earlier this month, EPA sent out a memo saying Browner found the murals "deeply troubling" and "inappropriate" and would ask GSA to take the unusual step of "deaccessioning" them. But the GSA, asked if the murals are likely to be removed, said that the agency is loath to set a precedent by bowing to critics.

"This is not the only mural that depicts something someone could take offense to," said Andrea Mones, regional historic preservation officer for the GSA.

Some EPA employees, in fact, think the agency set a bad precedent by even temporarily covering the murals. The paintings should not be removed just because they depict "inconvenient" historical facts, said an EPA attorney, Dana Ott.

"It's hypersensitivity, it's not a solution to start covering up art. It's Orwellian," said Ott. He was so angry after he saw one of the covered-up murals that one night he rolled away the temporary display to expose it again. "There were people cheering me on," he said.

"Dangers of the Mail" itself has a history of offending-not because of its portrayal of natives, but because of its nudity, according to a 1937 Washington Post article. "Gasping employees" rushed to see it, some "admired" it, others "were offended." Time magazine ran a picture of the mural and readers protested the use of their tax dollars for salacious art. And even back then, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes expressed concern that the portrayal of the Indians might not be accurate.

The headline over the Post photograph summed up Mechau's response:

" 'It's History,' Says Painter of Nude Scalping Mural."