Sioux Me

Mourning an Imagined Community's Overnight Disappearance

January 27, a friend writes from New York: "I ran grief stricken to the American Museum of Natural History. But I only did this with about forty-five minutes left in the day. The urgency was a newspaper story which appeared online that morning but I now see has only made the front page today—the American Indian Wing would be closed."

This friend and I share an imaginarium, a childhood on Manhattan's Upper West Side in the late 1970s and 1980s. Our fathers both died young and are buried in the same cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, simple headstones amid Art Deco mausolea. Perhaps because of these early losses, or for other mysteries of temperament and sensibility, we both keep deep sentimental attachments to the few remaining traces of a youth spent in a place where now only the landscape of the buildings and Central Park appears familiar. New money, new stores, touristy vibes, new people, every inch monetized to the point where you expect to be charged for breathing. Nothing of the neighborhood remains but has suffered a sea change into something many times more rich and estranged.

I learned the war cry of Crazy Horse from a book about the Battle of the Little Bighorn, told and illustrated from the point of view of the Sioux, possibly purchased from the same Natural History Museum gift-shop: "Today is a good day to die. Only the mountains and the rocks are forever." This, along with "all that is solid melts into air" would have been good words to live by for two boys growing up in New York City in almost any era.

But attachments are stubborn. Whatever Buddhists and real estate developers tell us about letting go of them, they can also be instructive. I don't know exactly how it was for my friend, but I used to spend occasional latchkey kid weekday afternoons at the museum. This was when I was eleven, twelve—after school and before my parents came home from work or medical appointments. Cold winter afternoons, light failing, down the old carriageway ramp entrance along 77th street—less crowded there—passing under the warm yellow-orange glow of street lamps—the smell of mold from wheezing heating ducts and the smells of institution, disinfectant or ammonia; the smell of boyself after a long school day, gym class and cafeterias, unzipping a coat, shedding layers, always too hot or too cold, glasses fogging up, a fug of familiarity at the portal to the radical elsewhereness and escape I was longing for without being aware of it.

I used the museum the way kids watched TV: The purpose of the galleries was not "to learn how to think about Native American culture and my late-coming settler-colonial relationship to it," or to wonder what those objects were doing in a museum with fossils and dinosaur bones, taxidermied animals and display cases of pinned insects instead of across the park with statues and paintings and suits of armor and furniture from Europe in the museum dedicated to something called art. These questions occurred to me too, in time, without my needing to be "educated" in anything other than the importance of asking questions. What I sought from those afternoons was an experience of relief, benign estrangement rather than "alienation," a total immersion in a world I could project myself into without worrying about who that still forming self was.

The Great Plains and Southwest Indian galleries (the ones that were just closed) were never really my jam, as they were for my friend. I preferred the Pacific Northwest—the totem poles and the great Haida war canoes suspended from the ceiling by wires, filled with imposing and appropriately costumed mannequins. But my true love was reserved for the "Hall of Asian Peoples," an anthropological caravanserai of dioramas and furnished period rooms with painted mural backgrounds that transported you from the shamans of Siberia through China and then across the silk road routes. Samarkand is a magic name in the ears of an eleven-year-old. Down to India or over to the middle east, double back through the galleries to reach Japan and Korea. One of the rooms, or maybe more than one—recall is hazy—even played music—the plaintive twang of a Japanese koto—or was it a classical Indian rag?— would reach me from a distant gallery and I would follow it to the source.

I hated school trips to these places, but would wander on my own indefinitely until the lights dimmed and a bell rung somewhere and the guard who might have been silently shadowing me for rooms and rooms announced it was closing time.

The point here, to be vulgar, is not that the museum was wrong to close the First Peoples exhibits, that this is another instance of "wokeism" run amok as a result of "Big Government" interference. We are dealing with the fruits of a just law: The Native American Graves and Repatriation Act, first passed in 1990! That it is only now coming effectively into force is hardly a symptom of Progressive or Liberal overreach. The issue— to be vulgar again—is that its belated enforcement has seemed to arrive with the same callousness and lack of both care and imagination that previously had been attached to its neglect.

Neither our current culture, nor our current politics of culture, nor our culture of legal enforcement of cultural norms provides any real framework for addressing a balance of differing interests in such cases. Do Native Americans have rights to dispose of and display ancestral and ceremonial objects in ways that honor and enrich the traditions these objects emerged from while also enabling the transmission of those traditions down through current generations? Absolutely. Should the claims and feelings of the descendants of the makers and users of these artifacts—rapt from them essentially as spoils of war—take precedence over a later-coming group of people who used these same artifacts to quicken, broaden, and deepen our sense of possibility and possible worlds, better or just different from what we knew? I would assent to this, too. But why pretend as if there are no valid traditions, no practices, no memories related to place and family and individual thriving that have attached to these same objects under different conditions that emerged in the century or so from the museum's founding?

What my friend seemed to want and what I would have wanted, too, was an opportunity to say goodbye, an official or unofficial mourning ceremony:

Announcement: The Native American Galleries at the American Museum of Natural History will be closing for an indefinite period of time. Those wishing to pay their respects will have two months to do so. Admission fees shall be waived.

This does not seem like too much to ask, and yet it occurred to none of the museum curators to do this. Maybe they have a grand plan to offer harmless 3-D printed facsimile reproductions of the problematic sacred objects? Maybe the museum is dipping into its endowment or budget to commission new canoes and new work from living tribal practitioners of these arts before unveiling the new galleries? It would be pretty to think so. But if good news is coming, they are being closed-mouthed about it. The only published statement offered in The New York Times was excerpted from a letter to museum staff: “The halls we are closing are artifacts of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples…Actions that may feel sudden to some may seem long overdue to others.” Long overdue indeed. They already had over thirty years to come up with a solution that did not effect a different kind of desecration.

My friend and I have no reason to feel guilt or shame over our love for these galleries. Nor does it really help us to have another piece of our childhoods—taken from us too soon when our fathers died—stolen from us again from one day to the next. He ran to the museum to snatch a last glimpse of a meaningful place, and if I had been there I would have run with him.

On some level of desire, both of us also wanted to be able to share the memory palace of the museum as we knew it with our own children. There was the official history of the place and how it came into being and our own history of it, what it meant to us. We wanted the pleasure of handing on our own stories. We were not strangers to these objects, curiosity hunters, tiny imperialists in the making. We did not look down on them. They were our friends.

America, when not berserker-psychotic, is addicted to melancholy, haunted by its history of dispossessions. Every sustainable mode of life, every apparent equilibrium, from the hunting of buffalo to affordable housing for the people who teach our children about the people who used to hunt the buffalo, is subjected every generation to violent uprooting. Even ransacking. Even looting. If we really want to "decolonize" our museums and our imaginations, we have to shed the mindset that believes one can only give by taking, compensate by depriving, reward by punishing. The damned and the elect still jostle for space in the heads of cultural administrators. As American life pluralizes and complicates and offers up the unexpected encounter in ways I hope I’ve made clear, these bureaucrats of the human spirit still understand their work as a zero sum game: the validation or invalidation of experience.

It is okay for me to let go of the American Indian dioramas and scenes of my childhood, to watch them recede into time. It is also okay for me to let go of the words “American Indian,” however deeply imprinted they remain. We change. We grow, thank God. This is not an argument for bringing back the milk man. It does no one any good, however, to have that past deleted, to be told that the scenes of one's childhood ought never to have been there to begin with. It's not an exaggeration to say that I owe to those galleries a great part of my own sense of freedom.

Many thousands of others have had the same experience, I hope. Let’s just state what everyone knows, the Natural History Museum is a children’s museum, and everyone enters the world a beginner, innocent as they’ll ever be, able to feel, as birthright.

I had already let go of the museum as a teenager (too close to home), but the influence of those exhibits drew me to other places, other works of culture no less marvelous for its crimes of appropriation, Kafka's fragment titled "On the wish to be a Red Indian":

If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one's spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse's neck and head would be already gone. 

—For TB and JK