Museum of Native American History Tells Story with Artifacts and Architecture

As the door to this mammoth structure swung open and the uniformed guard requested my bags and metal objects be placed on an x-ray machine, the enormity of the building became apparent.   The foyer itself seemed large enough to house a mountain, with staircases hugging the walls of the circular room, blending into circular patterns and finally focusing the eyes on a single circular skylight.  The colors were very neutral and there were only two items on display, a canoe and a carving that seemed to be a chiseled cross section of a great tree trunk.   At first glance it struck me as quite odd, for I was in a museum and expected the normal plethora of historical artifacts and quotes piled atop one another in New York City subway fashion.

After I made it across the great spans of rotunda and began looking at actual artifacts, the reasoning for so much “wasted space”, as I overheard someone call it, became apparent.  The tens of thousands of years the Native Americans inhabited this land before European civilization; there were no skyscrapers, no enormous houses, and no children of industry.  The native people lived at one with the land and felt great accomplishment by doing just that.  This philosophy was not understood by the English, French, Spanish, and Dutch imperialists that came to conquer.  That fundamental difference immediately rooted a thought of superiority in the Europeans.  As the Europeans continued to spread throughout the land, Native American artifacts devolved from the one great piece of physical history, and their means of transportation around it, to increasing amounts of tangible items that were decreasing in size and value. 

Examples of such depreciation were the Peace Medals that Presidents gave to tribal leaders of powerful Indian nations in order to form alliances.  In the beginning, George Washington’s peace medal was ornately engraved by hand on a sheet of silver.   Washington’s medal depicted an American and an Indian shaking hands across a creek as a display of equality and friendship.   Thomas Jefferson’s medals were made much more hastily by striking the ever shrinking sheets of silver with a mold of the president’s likeness.  When the practice originated, Indians lived on vast expanses of land.  As the land became more occupied by the Americans it seemed, by looking at the exhibit, that pleasing the Natives was becoming less of a priority and more of a hassle.

The prejudice of the time, which sprouted from the economic need for success and the spread of capitalism, was utilized to squash what was not understood and further the cause of colonization in the Americas.  “To colonize is to conquer”, and the reciprocity the natives lived by had no room for conquest.  This, being their way of life, left them open for the subconsciously racist and genocidal plans of the Europeans such as Columbus and Ponce de Leon who were in constant search of gold.  This practice continued throughout the 1800’s with the intentional infection of Indians with the Smallpox virus at Fort Pitt, and Manifest Destiny that was based on the expansionist ideals of Thomas Jefferson.   

After seeing the museum and visualizing the story of the Native Americans through every aspect of the structure from artifacts to architecture, the most important part of the Native American story was the many thousands of years that were spent living at one with the earth and not continually acquiring more things of treasure.  The only way that this intangible piece of history could be displayed was to show a sort of, “Empty Architecture” that would represent wasted space to an expansionist but reveals the greatest achievement the natives reached, survival.