Category: NMAI

Ken Burns and “The Americans”

Hollow Horn Bear–1923 US Postage Stamp

I’ve been a big fan of Ken Burns’ documentaries—like many I watched the Civil War series as it came out; like many (though not as many) watched “Baseball” explore the post Civil War Civil Rights journey; and I caught most of the recent “Vietnam” series the first time around and will watch the one episode and parts of others I missed as they come back to my screen.

Yet there is a giant hole in the work of Ken Burns. In the September 4 issue of the New Yorker, author Ian Parker profiles the documentarian, and the headline writers call it “Mr. America.” Parker recounts many of Burns’ triumphs, from “The Brooklyn Bridge” to “Mark Twain” and the “Dust Bowl.” And he quotes Burns on at least ten ideas for the future, including “Hemingway,” “Crime and Punishment in America,” and “Country Music,” which is already in the can and set to run. He’s also considering “Winston Churchill,” and chuckles that it fits into his pantheon because Churchill had an American mother.

Burns is a history buff, an American History buff. But something big is missing: Americans. Here I step back to the original meaning of that term. The current issue of American Indian Magazine announces the fall exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian, “The Americans.” It then explains that

“The exhibition’s title is a play on words. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the first definition provided for ‘American’ is ‘An indigenous inhabitant of (any part of) the Americas; an American Indian.’ This usage was common until the early 19th century.”

I googled. Here is the 1828 Webster’s Definition: “A native of America; originally applied to the aboriginals, or copper-colored races, found here by the Europeans; but now applied to the descendants of Europeans born in America. The name American must always exalt the pride of patriotism.”

The NMAI exhibit traces the use of Indian images by government and industry over the entire course of US history, from a 1792 “Peace and Commerce” medal with a bare-breasted and beautiful Indian “queen,” to the “Tomahawk missile” and (my favorite) the Pontiac car, named after an Ottawa Indian Chief who’d beat the British.

Maybe the most dramatic image is that of Hollow Horn Bear, and I quote at length from the American Indian Magazine article because it says it all:

Already a familiar face in Washington, D.C., Sicangu (Brule) Lakota chief Mat ó Hé lo e a, or Hollow Horn Bear (c. 1850–1913) became the iconic, if unnamed, “American Indian” by 1923, when his likeness appeared on the new 14-cent U.S. postage stamp. He also appeared on the five-dollar bill, the first and only historic Native to be shown on U.S. paper currency. Hollow Horn Bear fought alongside Oglala Lakota Chief Red Cloud in Red Cloud’s War of 1866–68 and participated in the defeat of Gen. George A. Custer in the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876. Yet he later served as a delegate to the federal government and marched in the inaugural parades of Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 and Woodrow Wilson in 1913. His transition from feared enemy to national symbol is one of the mysteries explored in the major new exhibit “Americans,” opening this fall at the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall.

The complications: an Indian who lived through the Indian Wars and fought against one-time hero George Custer, but did not live long enough to see the true story of Custer explained to the public—or to see his own image on a US Postage Stamp! Somehow exemplary of the crazy many-sided ways that later Euro-Americans have addressed, and continue to address, the people who were here to meet the Mayflower, Columbus’ boats, and those of the slavers. The “500 Nations” of North America and the many more of Central and South America.

I’d challenge the historian in Ken Burns to take on this story, one that makes the complications of the Civil War and Vietnam pale, a story about Americans who saved the Plymouth colony and Lewis and Clark, influenced Benjamin Franklin and the first colonialists, and excited Rousseau, the fur traders, mountain men, and generations of movie makers. And these Americans—unlike the Civil War heroes and the fading population of World War II veterans and Rosy the Riveters, are alive today and holding on to languages and cultures that sustained them long before the new Americans hit the shores of the American continents.

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Senator Daniel Inouye and the Museum of the American Indian


National Museum of the American Indian, Washington D.C.
The recent passing of Senator Daniel Inouye caused me to remember Alvin Josephy’s respect for him and a story that I tell now in hopes that someone still alive can corroborate or deny it.
The Museum of the American Indian/Heye Foundation was established by George Gustav Heye in 1908 and opened to the public in New York City in 1922. Heye, a wealthy New Yorker obsessed with Indian artifacts, sent expeditions from one end of the Americas to the other and accumulated over a million of them. He died in   1957, leaving his museum to the People of New York.
But the museum came on hard times in the 1970s. Its neighborhood had deteriorated, attendance had dropped, and artifacts been sold to keep the place running. My recollection from Alvin is that he, his former classmate at Harvard, David Rockefeller, and a few others were appointed to the MAI Board to straighten things out. I know that Alvin was involved in a long effort at establishing museum collection policies (I believe this effort had influence beyond the MAI, but that “study” waits for another day), and that there was then a long period of political maneuvering about next steps for the museum.
Politicians Alfonse D’Amato and Daniel Moynihan fought to keep it in New York and fought over where to put it. Ross Perot offered to build a new $70 facility in Dallas, Texas, and the Board of Trustees actually entered into negotiations with him. The whole thing drug on for more than a decade.
And then Senator Inouye, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs, suggested that the Museum be moved to Washington D.C. and be made part of the Smithsonian, and introduced legislation calling for $100 million to build a new facility. More long negotiations followed, and eventually an agreement was reached—legislation passed in 1989 with amendments in 1996. Senator Inouye and Alvin Josephy were both named to the Board of Trustees, and Alvin was elected as its first chair. A new satellite museum, the Heye Center, was opened in New York City at the Customs House (honoring the Heye stipulation that the collection be “for the people of New York”) and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian opened on the Mall in Washington D.C. in 2004.
Here is the story that I remember Alvin telling, though I took no notes and cannot find written confirmation of it now: While negotiations were going on with Ross Perot in New York, it came to Senator Inouye’s attention that the vaults of the Smithsonian Museums in Washington D.C. held the skeletal remains of some 16,000 American Indians. There were pressures from other groups—women and African Americans as I recall, to build the next Smithsonian Museum on an open place on the Mall, but Inouye was outraged with the story of skeletal remains, and pushed for the Smithsonian to make things right with Indians. First Americans should have a place in the Capitol. As circumstantial  corroboration of this story, Inouye also introduced the “Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990,” causing the Smithsonian to send remains back to tribes for proper burial. 
In the news following Inouye’s death, which was almost lost in the blitz of holiday and budget crisis reports, Indian leaders eulogized the Senator as a champion of Indian rights and civil rights for all Americans. It could be that the Smithsonian’s own dubious holdings—the result of “scientific collection” over decades—were not as large or of as much significance as I remember Alvin describing them. But I think that the essence of the story, the ways in which some humans dehumanize other humans, even in the name of science, is a lesson worth remembering. And if it helped to spur the construction of that marvelous place in Washington D.C., repatriation of remains, pride among American Indians and  respect for them by the rest of us, the good Senator showed how decades and even centuries of wrongs can be turned towards the good.
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McCullough and Josephy—part 2

I mentioned in an earlier blog that Alvin hired David McCullough at American Heritage. I implied that Alvin began working for and hired David for the magazine, but in fact Alvin’s first job and his hire of David were in the book division of American Heritage. Alvin would later become editor of the magazine.

Parallels: David McCullough was a lit major in college, and had been a journalist with Sports Illustrated and the United States Information Agency when Alvin hired him at American Heritage. At some point, McCullough came across a batch of photos of the Johnstown flood. He had grown up in Pennsylvania with stories of that catastrophe, so his interest was aroused, and he went to the bookshelf. Finding no acceptable history of the event, he determined to write it himself. The Johnstown Flood was his first book.

Alvin was working at Time Magazine when he came across the Nez Perce story. He had been a print and radio journalist before the War and a Marine Corps correspondent during the War. He picked up all the available literature on the Nez Perce—and like McCullough with the Jamestown flood, found the books on the shelf wanting. Eventually, after finding Yellow Wolf and Hear Me My Chiefs, first person accounts of Nez Perce history and the their war, Alvin determined to write the Nez Perce book himself.

Here is where paths part. David McCullough finished the Johnstown book, and, after three years at American Heritage, determined to make it in the world as a narrative historian. He knew it was a gamble, but, with support from his wife (who was his first reader), he made the leap and never looked back. Books on the Brooklyn Bridge, the Panama Canal, and presidents Truman and Adams followed He also began introducing and narrating historical programs—“Smithsonian World,” and then “American Experience”—for public television. Today, David McCullough is the recognized dean, and probably the most widely read, historian in America.

Alvin started plugging away at his Nez Perce book in the early 1950s—while working full time and climbing the editorial ladder at American Heritage. His books were written at a slower pace—The Nez Perce and the Opening of the Northwest was a dozen years in the writing—because he had the other jobs, and because he was becoming an advocate for Indians as well as historian. But the “other job” at American Heritage allowed him to weigh in, as editor, editor in chief of book division, editor of the magazine, on a wide range of subjects that interested him, from the history of flight and seafaring to wars and civilizations. It allowed him to make his marks in American history in many ways—choosing topics and writers for books and the magazine, and hiring the likes of McCullough!

It also gave him access to organizations and individuals promoting Indian rights, and he was soon on the board at the Heye Museum of the American Indian, giving speeches at the National Congress of the American Indian, working with the Native American Rights Fund, and consulting on Indian affairs to Stuart Udall under President Kennedy and directly for President Nixon.

The interesting thing about Alvin is that through it all, a big part of him worked away at being a narrative historian. He did write Patriot Chiefs and the Nez Perce book, and, eventually, a landmark historical treatise on the Civil War in the West. He worked on a Hudson’s Bay history project, which was aborted by the death of Happy Rockefeller (but that is another story!), and there are 13 huge folders of material and manuscripts for articles and a book on the Sioux in the Josephy Archives at the University of Oregon.

I believe that what drove McCullough in his writing and his public television presentations, and what drove Alvin, as an editor, publisher, and historian, is a similar view of history. They both believed in narrative history, well researched and showing all sides of historical events and the people involved in them. More importantly, it was history as a living thing, a series of men’s and women’s actions and choices rather than of predetermined events and glories. McCullough summed it up in the Paris Review interview I quoted last time around:

“In truth, nothing ever had to happen the way it happened. Nothing was preordained. There was always a degree of tension, of risk, and the question of what was going to happen next… No one knew Truman would become president or that the Panama Canal would be completed.”

That view drove McCullough to serious history; it drove Josephy to history—and to activism!

Bobbie Conner new Board Chair at NMAI

Some of you might have already heard, but it is worth repeating! Roberta “Bobbie” Conner is the incoming Chair of Board of Trustees of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. She has been on the Board since 2008, co-facilitated a Tribal museum directors meeting at NMAI in January, and will chair her first Trustees meeting February 9 and 10 in Washington D.C.

I have known Bobbie primarily through working on the Nez Perce Homeland project in Wallowa, where she and I are still board members. But she also gave a lecture on “Lewis and Clark through Indian Eyes” at Fishtrap, and she was in fact one of the writers in Alvin’s last book, the one he and Marc Jaffe edited called Lewis and Clark through Indian Eyes. And I had the great good fortune to work with Bobbie, Alvin, Cliff Trafzer, other historians and Tribal elders and editor Jennifer Carson on Wiyaxayxt / Wiyaakaaawn / As Days Go by: Our History, Our Land, Our People: the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla.

I’ll put in a plug for that book while I’m at it. Each section paired an elder with a recognized historian, and each section had an outside reviewer. My role was as reviewer, but meeting with the “team” of elders and historians to discuss the project in its beginnings, and meeting again to review progress were privileged experiences. The project started in 2000–largely, I am sure, because of Bobbie’s vision and hard work–and the book was published by the University of Washington Press in 2006.

Bobbie is Cayuse, Umatilla and Nez Perce and a member of the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla. Her maternal great grandparents were from the Columbia and Snake Rivers and their tributaries. She is a graduate of Pendleton High School, the University of Oregon, and Willamette University’s Graduate School of Management. She left a fast-rising career at the U.S. Small Business Administration–among other positions, she directed the Sacramento District—to become the director of the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute in April 1998. (And if you have not visited that marvelous place, please put it on your must see list. Check the web site at http://Tamastslikt.com/ .)

Of course what completes this circle is that Alvin was the founding board chair at NMAI. Some of that tale is told in A Walk Towards Oregon, how it started with the Heye Museum in New York City, and went through twists and turns that landed the greatest collection of indigenous American artifacts—the Heye collection is said to have numbered a million such—on the Mall in Washington D.C. You can feel Alvin’s hand in the way the museum is a living thing, with history from the Indian point of view and contemporary portrayals of Tribal culture and activities. Visit it if you are ever in the District. I see by my emails that a celebration of chocolate, one of the West’s great contributions to world food and culture, is in the works this February.

And congratulations of course to Bobbie for this well deserved honor. And good luck in the job!