The summer after my junior year of high school I spent a little over a week on an American Indian reservation in North Dakota, called the Standing Rock Lakota Sioux reservation. I was part of a team running a week of overnight camp for middle schoolers on the reservation. It was an amazing time for many reasons. The week opened my eyes to the plight of American Indians in our country. On the reservation, the alcholism rate was 80%, and the unemployment rate was 60%. The land on the reservation was pretty much infertile. The towns in the reservation were lifeless. Beyond lifeless. They would suck the life right out of you. Feelings of uselessness, boredom, depression, and worthlessness pervaded the place. I get up in arms about blacks and Hispanics being oppressed in America, but they have it good compared to the lot we gave American Indians. Census briefs from the 1990 census report that 20% of reservation homes don't have complete plumbing, and 20% don't have complete kitchen facilities (for the rest of America numbers are about 4%). Even American language and culture have not yet come to respect American Indians: sports teams are still named the Redskins or the Braves, and caricatures of American Indians are still very common.
The Gateway Arch. Part of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. I wrote in a post awhile back about this museum I visited in St. Louis, on my drive from Houston to South Bend. The museum is just what the name sounds like: a tribute to American westward expansion. I found this museum to be a little bit disturbing. It narrated expansion from Lewis and Clark on, including narrating the destruction/subjugation of many American Indian tribes. There is a national park commemorating this? Co told me I should think of it in terms of the settlers, often people with little or no money, finally getting a chance to make it. Still, I have a hard time looking at this museum/national park with anything but disgust.
Last weekend I went to the polar opposite museum. The National Museum of the American Indian. The museum just opened last Tuesday in Washington DC, occupying the last available space on the mall. (I was lucky enough to land a free trip to DC for the weekend visiting a dear friend from college). There was a big festival on the mall for the grand opening, including 8 or 10 stages with all sorts of dance, storytelling, and music going on, not to mention yummy American Indian food.
The museum itself was very cool. The first exhibit we walked into was called "Our Peoples: Giving Voice to Our Histories." The first wall, there it said: "INVASIONS". It chronicled the sad history of American Indians being invaded, pushed out, destroyed by European diseases, tricked, and treatied off their land. At some parts I actually got teary reading the horrible descriptions of what happened to these people. The great thing about the museum is that they went to American Indians and had them create the exhibits, and it's a living history museum. The other two big exhibits were "Our Universes: Traditional Knowledge Shapes Our World" (about traditional beliefs) and "Our Lives: Contemporary Life and Identity" (all about American Indians today, both on and off reservations, etc).
One of the coolest things about being there opening weekend is that there were many people there who are actually American Indians. And given the cosmopolitan and diverse nature of DC, there were also plenty of black people there, plenty of white people, and plenty of Asian people. It was one of those rare times I felt good about race relations in America, like we were actually taking a step in the right direction by taking a truthful look at our past and where we are, and coming together to celebrate usually denigrated cultures.
As a footnote, I'd just like to add that I think it's a bit ironic the federal government supports both the westward expansion and the American Indian museums.
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