Saturday, March 5, 2005
Here's an interesting article critiquing the National Museum of the American Indian's handling of Native American history. I think it sounds a common theme where the the way a culture's history is presented is handled uncritically in a historically sloppy manner so as not to give offense and to avoid controversy. What you end up with is not only bad history, but fabricated history, self-identifyers who not only don't understand that their own background is not what they may honestly believe it to be, and outsiders who neither understand their own or others' stories.
This would be a shame in purely academic matters where the loss of real history, or the narratives told are taken as fact when they are not such is a true shame, but in situations where history dictates how we deal with today's problems - as with issues surrounding Native Americans and other groups - can be truly dangerous and run counter to finding real, working and just policies. In such cases, no one's interests are served.
Some people seem to have a favored status, and are what I like to call "pet people" - patronized by other groups who are often hyper-self-critical - a situation where, again, no one's interests are served.
Reading this piece, I couldn't help thinking about the entry below and how the Palestinian Arabs come out as a "pet people" of DePaul University (and others), where their narrative in swallowed whole and enshrined uncritically as dogma.
No one benefits when the truth is put second tier to patronizing appeasement.
The Claremont Institute: National Myth of the American Indian
At NMAI, the omissions are joined by myth. Salient among the myths is the portrayal of all Indians as "manag[ing] our environment to make sure it provides for us today and in the future." Not only are all Indian Nations depicted as model environmentalists today, not only are they all shown as having been model environmentalists since the beginning of time, but environmentalism, according to NMAI, is actually central to Indian religion. Nation after nation in the permanent displays makes a statement like these: "The Yakama Nation is a leader in the protection and restoration of resources. We're a leader, not because we want to be, but because the Creator put us on this landscape to be just that—stewards of the land." "Every time the elders talk, they tell us we were given responsibility to look after Mother Earth. That's our job, the Anishnaabe people."
This is fictionalized history of a kind common to all national revivals...
