New American Indian Museum in DC

9/21/04 | fourthrider

[fourthrider]

The new, and perhaps last, museum on the Capitol Mall has just been dedicated.

It is the National Museum of Native American History and it is built on the last available parcel of land on the Washington Mall.

It is a beautiful building, very striking and it's outside landscaping includes plants important to Native Americans, including tobacco.

One has to wonder how long the health nazis will allow those plants to survive.

The museum contains a wide range of Native American cultural artifacts from tribes all across the Northern Hemisphere including West Indies based native people.

The intent of the museum is to showcase the cultural contributions of all Native Americans.

But look as you might you will not find any written contemporary archives of any Native American history, nor will you find any examples of wheels designed and used by the ancient Native Americans.

That's because, despite living in the Northern Hemisphere for centuries, if not millenia, native peoples never came up with the idea of writing things down, nor did they ever figure out the wheel.

Maybe they were living in such balance with their natural surroundings that these impulses never arose, but I am informed by my Western European tradition and cannot understand being so at one with one's natural environment as to end up in technological stasis.

Then again Western Europeans moved on from being a hunter gatherers many millinia ago.

[muawiyah]

No writing?

There have been several writing systems devised in the New World. What happened was the Great Die-off where up to 90% of native populations were killed by Old World diseases (in New England in the mid 1600s the death rate among Indians was about 95%).

Their cultures collapsed. Their written documents were destroyed or lost due to the sort of conditions that surround such a high level of death.

In the absence of domesticated large draft animals able to "pull" rather than "lift" loads, the wheel was not of much immediate use, although it's clear that the principle of the wheel and axle are inherent in the simplest threaded bead.

I must note that folks were smelting copper up near Oconto, Michigan nearly 7,000 years ago ~ that's several thousand years before anyone in the Old World got around to it.

[Robert357]

The Architect from Canada is boycotting the new Indian Museum. I guess this is a big flap up in Canada.

Click to link to CBC.CA News story about Architect of Indian Museum boycotting opening!

OTTAWA - The Ottawa architect who created the original design for the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington has refused to attend the building's grand opening Tuesday, claiming the finished museum to be "a compromised work of art."

Douglas Cardinal, best known for designing the Canadian Museum of Civilization, was fired from the Smithsonian project in Washington in 1998. He said those who took over ruined his vision and attending the launch would be to absolve the museum of the wrong it has done to him.

National Museum of the American Indian. (AP photo) "It would be too hard for me to see how it's been compromised," he told CBC News. "It's a compromised work of art."