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NMH Magazine : Spring 2005

Native Vision

Music and celebration filled the Potomac room, a vast, circular meeting space soaring 120 feet upward to a massive dome. This is the heart of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), and it came to life on opening day, September 21, 2004.

The Smithsonian Institution’s newest museum is not a display case for bygone eras; it celebrates a diverse group of Native American tribes whose cultures continue to thrive and evolve. This ideal was embodied in musician and songwriter Keith Secola, who urged people into a round dance. Part rocker, part folk artist, part cult hero, Secola played his drum as the dancers moved around him in large concentric circles. Singing and dancing with them was Ceni Myles ’89, who coordinates the museum’s seminars and symposia. She could feel the powerful energy in the room as Natives and non-Natives moved in unison to Secola’s music. “This is what this space was created for,” she thought. Every time she enters the Potomac, she remembers that day.

“The museum doesn’t take one side or the other on any issue,” she says. “It’s seen as a space for a dialogue, for an exchange for Native and non-Natives to come together, to put their minds together.”

Myles, who is both Mohegan and Navajo, is one of three NMH alumni working at the museum. The others are Gerald Tieyah ’91 and Marion Gill ’82.

Tieyah is a member of the Comanche Nation. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and daughter and endures five hours a day on a commuter train to Washington, DC, so he can manage the museum’s 127 volunteers.

“Our cultures are still here despite all the genocidal attempts to destroy them,” he says. “We are still a people and we still have vibrant cultures. We still have a place in this world.”

Gill is a longtime employee of the Smithsonian. An African American, she is special assistant to the museum’s deputy director. Guidance from American Indians shaped much of the museum’s design and content, an approach Gill says is revolutionary.

“It’s in first-person, Native voice,” she explains. “We’re just the people who helped bring it to fruition. But they are the ones who tell the stories.”

Fifteen years in the making, the NMAI was created by an act of Congress and took the last building site along the National Mall, within view of the Capitol building.

The NMAI mall museum is actually one of four related buildings. There’s also a museum in New York City, named after George Gustav Heye, the controversial collector who gathered most of the 800,000 objects in the NMAI’s collection. Many of these objects are revered as living beings; those not on display are kept at the third building, a state-of-the-art facility in Maryland. What’s known as the fourth museum is symbolic. It represents efforts to take the museum’s offerings into Native communities.

The NMAI is clearly different from its more traditional neighbors along the National Mall. A five-story sinuous structure, it appears to have been sculpted in place by wind and water. The creamy yellow limestone that clads its exterior is set in horizontal rows, emphasizing the building’s connection to the land. When the sun shines overhead, a warm, orange glow flows along the building’s rough surface, spilling into the shadows created by its curved walls. The interior spaces are curved as well. Great care went into eliminating sharp corners throughout the $199 million structure. Visitors must look carefully to find one.

Outside, where a Native landscape fills most of the four-acre site, are four stones from Hawaii, northern Canada, Maryland, and Tierra del Fuego, Chile. These stones mark the four cardinal points and symbolize the museum’s ambition to create a space where all Native people can tell their own stories.

In that spirit, here are the stories of the three NMH alumni who work inside this remarkable place.

Having grown up in a predominantly Jewish suburb of Washington, DC, Marion Gill didn’t encounter true diversity until she went to NMH. She bonded with a Native American student there after they both lost a parent. The way he mourned his father gave her insight into Native culture.

“That’s when I began to have an inkling of what community meant,” she says. “It was much more far-reaching and deeper than what I understood.”

Gill is a project manager: she ensures that a project’s multiple threads weave together in a way that’s both on time and true to what the planners envisioned. She came to the NMAI nearly five years ago and was handed the task of coordinating the project’s myriad schedules—construction, exhibits, programs, opening day celebrations.

Often she’d march down the hallway toward a conference room clutching an updated schedule that changed before she got there. In the midst of all that, she battled a mysterious illness for a year before doctors learned it was narcolepsy.

Through her work, she developed a deep respect for the ties that bind Native people together despite generations of persecution. Her family has close ties to the African American community, but not like this.

 “It wasn’t about being left out. It was about, ‘This is the strongest connection I’ve ever seen and I want to be a part of it!’”

Surrounded by people digging deep for their roots, Gill has turned to her own family history. It turns out she may have Cherokee ancestry on her mother’s side, and she’s exploring this with the help of the museum’s research center.

Gerald Tieyah grew up in southwest Oklahoma, only five miles from the tribal headquarters of the Comanche Nation. At NMH, Tieyah faced his own stereotypes about non-Natives. His roommate was of Indian ancestry—as in from India. Instead of the Gandhi-like figure Tieyah expected, he was a gigantic former football player. “So, stereotype number one just went out the door,” Tieyah says.

As he went on to build a career as a volunteer coordinator, Tieyah kept involved in Native issues. For example, he advocated awareness about groups threatening American Indian sovereignty and fought the use of Native names for sports teams. Tieyah is not thrilled to be working so close to the Washington Redskins.

“It is derogatory, in and of itself. But it also comes from a time when Native peoples were hunted down and bounties were placed upon them by the government.”

Tieyah brought his convictions with him to the museum, where he had only months to create a volunteer organization. Visitors are not immune from ignorance, and volunteers are there both to welcome and educate them. Some of what museum guests do is silly or simply annoying, like the visitor who greeted Tieyah by saying “How.” More disturbing are teachers who show up with students in paper headdresses.

“It would be as if somebody came in wearing priest robes or vestments from a religion that doesn’t belong to them,” says Tieyah. “It’s a matter of respecting another people as you would want them to respect you.”

Tieyah, who seeks a future in Native activism and politics, relishes the bonds he’s forming with other American Indians at the museum. However, when 80,000 people gathered outside for the opening ceremonies, he wasn’t among them. Instead, he was inside the building, preparing with his volunteers.

 “We were able to see the very first people walk in the door, which was just an amazing feeling. Not only was the museum world going to change, but also a lot of people’s ideas about American Indians were going to change. That was a defining moment in my career.”

Ceni Myles grew up the eldest of six children, but her high school in Brookline, Massachusetts, was predominantly white. Coming to NMH was a welcome change because of the 25 Native American students she found there.

“There was a sense of understanding and also of not having to necessarily explain yourself,” she says. “There was something very safe about that.”

Her father is Mohegan from Connecticut. Her mother is Navajo and grew up on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. When Myles was four, she wrote the president of the United States urging him to return Native American land.

“Even though we lived in the city, I grew up with a clear understanding of who I was as a person, as a Native woman,” says Myles, who was married this May in a contemporary wedding, and will later hold a traditional Navajo ceremony.

She is also a loving daughter. In 2000, Myles donated the kidney that saved her mother’s life. “She responded probably one-hundred fifty percent. She had the color back to her face, she was glowing, she was full of energy.”

Myles joined the museum staff in 2002 and was co-team leader for the First Americans Festival. More than 675,000 people attended this six-day celebration of the museum’s opening; the festival included over 300 artists, performers, tradition bearers, and musical groups from 50 native communities. They came from as far north as the Arctic Circle and as far south as the jungles of Brazil.

Myles organizes the seminar and symposium program for the public programs department. She calls this the “native face” of the museum because it educates visitors about contemporary cultures by bringing in artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers, craftspeople, and even an astronaut. Meeting all these dynamic Native people can be an eye-opener, even for somebody as tuned into her culture as Myles.

“That has been very rewarding and very humbling,” she says. “If you look at all that’s happened to us as Native people, the fact that we’re still here today and vibrant is phenomenal.”

Studies show that the typical visitor devotes about two hours to a museum, and some of that is spent inside the gift shop. All three NMH alumni caution not to expect this at their museum.

“Our visitors come and they’re here all day; they read all the labels. Not only are they reading each label—they’re then talking about their interpretations and feelings with their family or friends. Right there, in the galleries,” Gill says.

Visitors should start at the fourth floor, where a video sets the tone for what follows. The three core exhibits explore Native American philosophies, Native histories, and contemporary Native cultures.

The Native people included in the exhibits guide what visitors will see, hear, and experience. This multifaceted mosaic of voices shatters preconceived notions of a homogenous Native culture that’s in decline.

“I really see the museum as a form of self-determination,” says Myles. “The museum is the vehicle in terms of carrying out what we, as Indian people, want.” 

 

Native Americans and NMH have a long, intricate history. In the school’s earliest days, founder Dwight L. Moody sought young Indian men and women as students. His motive was simple: As an evangelist, he felt the most effective preachers were those who came from the same culture as their audience—and there was a need for teachers and missionaries in Indian Territory.

The principal of Northfield Seminary traveled to Oklahoma Territory in 1880, a year after the school’s founding, and recruited 16 girls from the Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Shawnee Nations. In 1883, four young Choctaw men became Mount Hermon students. Of these 20 students, two graduated: Lydia Keyes and Jesse Ironside. (In those early days of the schools, less than ten percent of students graduated.)

Over the decades, a number of Native American notables attended the school, including Henry Roe Cloud ’06, founder of the first US high school for Native Americans; Walter Harper ’17, the first person to set foot on Mt. McKinley; Susie Yellowtail Walking Bear ’27, the first Native American nurse; and William Jacobs ’31, grandson of Chief Sitting Bull.

In the 1970s, NMH recommitted to recruiting Native American students, particularly in its capacity as an “opportunity school.” Many came here through the Transition-Year Program, which funds postgraduate study for high-achieving minority students. Between 1968 and 1996, 104 Native American students graduated from NMH; currently there are five American Indian students, and the school is exploring ways to keep the Native connection strong.