22 September 2004

NMAI

There are hundreds dead in Haiti from flooding  and savage murder in Baghdad. There are  pitiful pleadings of the next to die. No one is in a position to negotiate, since there is no way to talk to the murderers except in the Arab television. Other foreign Arabs may have murdered the Italian women they seized weeks ago, ironic, since the Americans were beheaded because two Iraqi women who ran parts of Saddam's Bugs and Gas program are still in the slammer. But they can't be released because the interim government hasn't reviewed the matter.

Or at least that is what they say. There is a new pandemic that may or may not be ready to roar out of Asia . It is a bird flu with a strange numbered name that can leap to humans. Health officials say we are overdue for an outbreak. There appears to be no way to negotiate with that either.

I am considering the invention of a device that potential hostages might wear upon their bodies. A locating device perhaps. Or perhaps an active version of the poison pill spies are issued to avoid torture. I thought of useful things to have, if condition of employment required you to live and work where the terrorist scum operate. I think we need options. I am considering patenting a device one could detonate in the unhappy event you were captured. Take the bastards with you.

But then we would all be belt bombers. Maybe that is where this is all going. It would make airline travel more problematic, I grant you, so there is clearly more work to be done on my idea. Perhaps I can take the matter up with the new Director of Central Intelligence, since he has been confirmed by the whole Senate and is supposed to be on the job this morning.

It was with considerable relief that I put the continuing crisis aside and stood in the darkness, listening to the exhilarating boom of drums and the sound of chanting. The vast curved bulk of the National Museum of the American Indian rose above me in a sandstone cliff. Light glowed through glass and the voices rose in the night. The bulk of the Capitol loomed just to the east, impossibly tall, magnified like the quarter moon that floated above in the heavens. Serene. Inviolate.

There was talk that the building would not be constructed, and then there were dark mutterings that it would never be completed once it was started. There were struggles and petty politics and the traditional wrangling and horse-trading. But now it was open, and would stay open through the night and to the end of the next business day.

The building is in the middle of a festival, and it is a homecoming for a people who never left. It is an appropriate and auspicious time for a festival. The Equinox is smack in the middle of it, and 198 years ago this week the Lewis and Clark expedition returned to St. Louis from the Pacific Northwest bringing word of vast plains and running water. And of native people, proud and strong.

I have a certain personal involvement in the grand opening. When I worked across the street in the square building named for Hubert Humphrey, the Happy Warrior from Minnesota . I regularly participated in the ancient Tobacco Ceremony, rain or shine, and watched the building rise on the Mall as I smoked. Many of Humphrey's constituents from the bands of the thousand lakes were around me in the night, some in full regalia, some dressed as tourists.

We flowed like water, since there is not a straight line on the building. It is even placed cock-eyed on the site, the door facing due east, untroubled by the rigid lines of L'Enfant's heroic plan for the new capital.

I saw them place the dome on the Museum, pre-cut and pre-cemented. Inside, looking up, there is a dream-catcher hung in the central orbit of the skylight. I saw the raw concrete walls covered with blue plastic and marveled at the scale model of the sandstone skin that they built off Indepdnence Avenue to show the masons what the skin of the building was intended to look like.

I saw the great steel girders that formed the cage of the eastern portico rise up, suspended by cranes. Then the concrete and cinderblock that bound it to the rest of the building, and wondered what the strange curved shapes would look like.

I hoped it was a crew of Mohawk Ironworkers who walked the narrow iron beams. The tribe from Upstate New York- more accurately from the Mohawk nation of the great Iroquois Confederation- are fearless of great heights, or have at least convinced themselves that they can fly, if necessary. Consequently, the great construction projects of the 20 th century always featured Indians at the very top. Of the structures, anyway.

The Museum is not nearly as tall as the iron they walked when they built the Empire State building, or the Twin Towers , but there is significant steel in this building, and it is theirs for a change.

I walked in the throng of native people, drinking in the energy. Part of it was reflected in costume, and partly in hair. Dark hair gathered back in ponytails. Shaved foreheads, and spiked Mohawks on young men who might actually have been Mohawks. Some young men wore paint, and one man, blonde hair piled in a wild mass on his head, stalked proudly through the gallery in red leggings and breechclout.

One of the permanent galleries is devoted to life in today's Indian Country. You enter the exhibit area through a passageway lined with mirrors. There is some sort of back projection that displays the image of native people walking beside you, old women, young kids, soldiers. I think it is intended to show that Indians are integrated in all aspects of the nation's life, though it is also just good fun.

The American Indian Movement- AIM- is incensed that the horror of the Indian experience is not fully conveyed. There are hints. There is a glass case devoted to the development of the gun, an integral component of survival and extinction. But AIM wants more, perhaps to use the prow of the great sandstone building as a spear in the side of the Capitol that looms above.

The time may come for that. The management of the NMAI had to raise the money to complete the building, and they have had to be nice to corporate and other charitable donors. Now that the building is complete, the politics of what will happen within its curved walls can begin.

Tonight there was joy. The crowd reflected the wild diversity of Indian Country. There are over 320 Federally-recognized tribes in the United States , not including the hundreds of village groups in Alaska . The Federal government has been inconsistent about what it considers a tribe.

There are treaties in a glass case signed with tribes the Government claims no longer exist, and there are people who insist that they are the still there. Some Indians suspect that white people are playing make-believe to try to get a share of the finite pool of resources the Government provides to Indian Country. And there are blondes with blue eyes who fully meet the criteria of tribal membership.

I have talked to people from both ends of the spectrum. President Joe Shirley of the Navajo Nation is one of the people I was proudest to meet. He is a straight-shooter of the Todich'iini clan, a part of the Tabaahi clan. To be a Navajo, you must be half by blood. They are proud, they do not gamble, and President Shirley presides over a nation that is bigger than the state of West Virginia . He looks like a Navajo.

I have also talked to others who look just like me. I say that carefully. Each tribe sets its own criteria for membership, based normally on blood percentage, but also on association. I am a quarter Irish, and I am proud of each drop of whiskey that runs in my veins. I talked to a vigorous man from Oklahoma one time , which was the territory at the end of the Trail of Tears from North Carolina .

He had a hint of high cheek-bones. Nothing you would notice ordinarily. He told me his grandmother's sister was the last full-blooded Indian in the family. She had been born just before the turn of the Century, and perhaps was included in the Final Roll of the Cherokee Tribe mandated by the Dawes Act of 1906, the hundredth anniversary of the return of Lewis and Clark. Or perhaps she was not, since many Indians seemed to have some distrust of the Great White Father's Agents.

Go figure.

He told me the Aunt was mostly blind in her later years and loved to rock on her porch. He said he talked to her of the old days as she swayed back and forth, and that it was easy to get her angry. When Russell Means and the other activists from AIM were besieged by the Feds at Wounded Knee in 1973, she was more than willing to get down off the porch and bake cookies. Or pick up a shotgun, either way.

So I was sensitive to the notion of who is and who is not an Indian. Recognized or not, there are hundreds of tribes and bands in town for the opening of the NMAI, and they have been parading and dancing for days on the Mall.

The beat of the drums was hypnotic in the soaring space. I was on the second floor ramp. I was listening to the booming of drums from below. I looked over the marble rail and at the great central atrium with its circle of life. There was a ring of Indians in cowboy hats and yellow beaded vests beating the drums. It made the place reverberate and joy and a guttural chanting accompanied the rhythmic beating. A young Indian girl appeared at my side. She looked up at me with dark eyes framed by black hair pulled back.

''South Cree?'' she asked, as if I would know. It is hard to tell exactly who is an Indian, after all. I looked at her blankly as a sharp rap on the drums echoed through the building. It was a distinctive note. She smiled.

''Gunshot beat,'' she pronounced, her head cocked to measure the signature boom of the mallets on the drumheads.

''North Cree,'' she said proudly. Then she disappeared in the crowd.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra