The NMAI Exterior, Washington, DC

The inclusivity boom in recent years observed across corporate and state institutions is a double-edged sword. Though at first glance, it may seem it is a clear sign of progress in American society, the reality is murkier. On one side is that by creating more spaces and opportunities for access and inclusivity, as a society, we are becoming more aware of the differences in race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, age, and religion, and we are therefore taking positive action to accommodate them. To a certain extent, this is true and it is easiest to prove in terms of progress across generations. To this point, ever since the Reconstruction-era segregation period was “removed” from American society with the introduction of the Fourteenth Amendment, all the way to the proposed, failed, but albeit massively impactful nature of the Equal Rights Amendment, we have progressed in a more tolerant and inclusivity-driven direction.

On the contrary, however, some of these corporate and state changes in our institutions’ awareness of different groups, especially with respect to race, sexuality, and class, are enacted for political strategy and social clout, and therefore profit, rather than exclusively for the greater social benefit. Since presenting a progressive attitude is the most profitable in the case of many corporate/private well-endowed institutions, they leap in this direction without respect to the social history of the movements that have built legitimate pathways to a more tolerant way of corporate/government behavior in the institutions they control. As a result, issues such as class tourism arise as an aspect of this perceived “integration.” In the American museum, specifically, these errors must be avoided in favor of a more concentrated effort in expanding accessibility and inclusivity programs. 

One cannot talk about accessibility without involving representation. Therefore our first strategy for this inclusivity effort is implementing various forms of representation. This serves institutions such as ours in not only expanding our patron base but also growing with respect to the polyphony of artistic and cultural projects in this diverse nation. 

Good representation means good for our institution’s goal of widening our patronage as well as broadening our own institutional limitations regarding race, specifically as part of our effort toward greater accessibility and inclusion. In this white paper, a selected case study from the National Museum of the American Indian will be scrutinized. We will consider where inclusivity and accessibility in regard to representation can be applied with candor, and where it is instead presented for clout, regardless of whether it was intentional or not. 

The document used in this assessment is Indigenous American writer, filmmaker, translator, and researcher James Graham-Lujan’s “A Museum of the Indian, not for the Indian” published in The American Indian Quarterly, Volume 29 by the University of Nebraska Press in 2005. The primary grievance Graham-Lujan has with the project of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington, D.C., which is part of the Smithsonian group of museums and research centers, is the muddiness of its target audience. Specifically, Graham-Lujan addresses as problematic the fact that Indigenous Americans are not included in that target group. Instead, as the title suggests, they are the primary subject of the museum, and not its intended audience, or at least not in practice. Graham-Lujan discusses the NMAI and its goals as “a museum of the Indian, by the Indian [not necessarily for the Indian],” making note of the failure committed by the museum’s planners to represent the thousands of Indigenous tribes as its central concern. If the NMAI is not intended for Indigenous Americans, then who is it intended for? 

This leads to the second strategy: specifying our target audience. For a successful inclusivity campaign for our institution, examining the example of what the NMAI did may teach some valuable lessons. 

A problem identified by the author which the museum should have had the goal to address is that “society and our education has the tendency to look over the history and culture of Indigenous people and act as if this culture does not exist.” This was, according to Graham-Lujan, not tackled appropriately by the founders of the museum (Graham-Lujan, 512). As mentioned, thousands of tribes were simply silenced and unrepresented on the museum walls and their artifacts were left unexhibited. This is part of the greater problem of mainstream cultural behemoths, such as the Smithsonian, in this project, refusing to acknowledge Indigenous peoples as part of the current societal makeup of this country, rather than a historical object observed from the present but left in the past.

While praising some of the groundbreaking conceptual ideas of the museum’s founders, such as giving tribes the opportunity to tell their stories from a first-person perspective, rather than the all-too-often used third-person narrative, Graham-Lujan criticizes the overly-simplistic nature of the project. That is, the museum’s founders chose not to exhibit tens of thousands of cultural artifacts from a variety of tribes across the nation and instead chose a minimalistic approach to storytelling. This ended up stripping away the essence of “drama” that makes the museum experience a story with a chronology worth visiting and following over time. As observed by Graham-Lujan, The NMAI fails in its mission to foster a space for any worthy academic study or even general in-depth data on the various tribes of this land. The author compares the artifacts exhibited at the NMAI to the superficial qualities, unspecificity, and out-of-context placement of the contents of a contemporary museum gift shop, rather than an academic institution with items bearing significant historical and research-qualifying weight (513). 

Leading to the third strategy, in addition to representation, historical accuracy is crucial for a successful inclusivity and diversity program. Though one of the primary goals of the NMAI was to highlight specific tribes’ cultures, the effort was poorly executed due to apprehension of not involving historically triggering content such as the violent past all tribes have suffered at the hands of the European colonizers. However, by only celebrating and highlighting positive or neutral aspects of the cultures and thereby sanitizing the violent past, these exhibits have an effect of homogenization rather than differentiation and historical specificity (515). In contrast to telling the familiar stories of Native enslavement, genocide at the hands of colonizers, and more broadly, conflict with the Europeans, the museum presents a more placid sample of a select few aspects of a select few tribes’ cultural values and traditions. This case begs the reader to propose to herself the difficult question “who is this [project] representing to?” When a paradox such as this case arises, specifically, when representation is improperly established, while the institution was created, to a large degree, on the ground of implementing a space for representation, the propensity for continuing a self-serving white American historical narrative continues in a regressive direction regarding representation. 

In analyzing the case of the NMAI, we can learn from how a primary goal such as creating a space for minority representation can fall flat even when the best of intentions for doing so are present. This project is a learning opportunity for us to consider how to include, represent, and discuss race and minority culture without creating the opposite effect. The primary point to be taken away from this case study is that in founding, or in our case, implementing a more representative and inclusive methodology for our museum operations, we must not ignore the tried and tested normative ways from which most contemporary cultural institutions are founded. That includes representation, a solid foundation on the grounds of historical documents and accuracy, and perhaps most importantly, a specific target audience from a range of backgrounds and abilities. To have an impact, we must leverage innovative ideas and diverse perspectives to continue building a museum that is not only welcoming to all but keeps a sensitivity and keen awareness of all multifaceted aspects of the members of our community in our company mission. In crafting a contemporary institution for a more inclusive environment, our colleagues, culture, content, and community must strive to reflect the diversity of the world we inhabit while not forgetting the principles of a museum as a place for education, entertainment, and cultural enlightenment.