November is Native American History Month; next year (2025) will mark the 350th anniversary of King Phillip’s War, the beginning of the end for the native people as the dominant polity on this continent. I’m marking the occasion with a series of daily posts related to the history of the Native Americans and their interactions with encroaching Europeans. Some will have to do with pop culture; others will be weightier. This series is dedicated to Sterling and Samantha.
This past weekend I had the (now) rare experience of kicking around the city with my two grown sons at the same time. These days it’s usually one or the other other a couple of times a year (and one has been abroad for the past couple of years, so even rarer). Anyway, we found ourselves in the extreme downtown, at the tip of Manhattan, and on a whim we popped into the somehow little known National Museum of the American Indian.
I’ve been in there a few times over the years, but it had been a minute, and this was a perfect opportunity to catch up. Which is more than most people do, I’ll wager, and that goes for both tourists and locals. The museum has been located at the spectacular old U.S. Customs Building, a huge edifice, since the 1990s, and it is right there in the middle of everything, right on Bowling Green halfway between Battery Park and Financial District destinations like the bull sculpture, the New York Stock Exchange, and Federal Hall. Furthermore, as a branch of the Smithsonian, attendance is free of charge. Yet I’ll bet that not one tourist in a hundred enters that building. Granted, at the moment, there is construction happening, and it’s boarded up a little, but even in ordinary times, people just walk past. Walking from the Battery, they go straight to the bull. Or heading south, they get lured by the sight of the harbor and rush right toward it.
I’m not here to defend it, as I’ve never been quite pleased with it myself. Nothing about it has ever seemed quite right. It doesn’t seem to belong there. On the one hand, it seems like it would be better with the rest of the Smithsonian branches down in DC. Barring that, it seems like it would fir better alongside the uptown museums around central park, the Met, the American Museum of Natural History, and the two history museums (New-York Historical Society and Museum of the City of New York). I do like the idea of there being a Native American history museum downtown, certainly, but what would make the most sense to me, would be a small, locally focused one, devoted to the Lenape who used to live here.
Before we go further down this road, though, I did want to say that we enjoyed our recent visit tolerably well. We enountered a sort of broad survey course of native history with artifacts respresenting tribes across the Americas, not just the U.S., but also Canada, the far north, and Central and South America. And there was a section on the Native Peoples of New York as well. So we walked away satisfied. I certainly didn’t feel as though whatever fraction of a penny in tax dollars went to support it went to waste, except perhaps with respect to the overly aggressive security at the door, which I always object to anyhow.
It wasn’t until later that I learned that the museum has been mired in turmoil for months, and that what we saw was apparently a fraction of what is customarily on view. Earlier this year apparently, officials from Biden’s Department of the Interior began aggressively enforcing the 1990 Native American Graves Repatriation Act. Both the Museum of the American Indian, and the American Museum of Natural History had to close down galleries, and have spent the past several months sorting through collections, in order to facilitate the return of tens of thousands of artifacts to the original tribes to which they belonged. There was some squawking about it in the local press, but I don’t see how you get around it being the right thing to do. Even if you’re worried about the tribe’s ability to take proper care of the artifacts, the items are theirs to destroy if they so wish. Funny how the right, which loves to pontificate about property rights, changes their tune when it’s a matter of the booty of colonialism. And if you’re concerned about the inablity of folks to contemplate these objects in New York, there are many ways around it. The items could be borrowed for exhibitions. The tribes could start their own museums, and send their exhibitions to the city. And if their religion forbids it with certain items, the objects can be replicated. AND, as we’ve already established, there doesn’t seem to be huge demand for viewing these objects in NYC anyhow.
And if scholars need to study the actual objects, they’ll just have to travel to wherever they have been returned. My only beef with the Graves Repatriation Act has to do with when it interferes with paleoanthropology — but this would not be the month to rant about that!
At any rate, the Biden Administration is about to pass into history itself, and I doubt very much that their successors will be inclined to honor any of their policy decisions. Though I also can’t imagine them caring very much about this one, one way or the other. That said, go see what you can of the National Museum of the American Indian — while you can. Learn more here.