Criticism
The National Museum of the American Indian has been criticized for various reasons due to its display of its exhibits. Two Washington Post reviews on the museum were hostile at the representation of the American Indian. Two writers, Fisher and Richard, expressed "irritation and frustration at the cognitive dissonance they experienced once inside the museum". Fisher expected the displays that depicted the clash between foreign colonists and the native people. The exhibit lacked a trace of Indians’ evolution from centuries of life on this land, and gave little information as to the history of their survival. He concludes, "The museum feels like a trade show in which each group of Indians gets space to sell its founding myth and favorite anecdotes of survival. Each room is a sales booth of its own, separate, out of context, gathered in a museum that adds to the balkanization of a society that seems ever more ashamed of the unity and purpose that sustained it over two centuries". Richards, who also had a similar assessment of the NMAI, begins his criticism by observing that he found the exhibits to be confusing and unclearly marked. To him, the exhibits were full with a mixture of "totem poles and T-shirts, headdresses and masks, toys and woven baskets, projectile points and gym shoes". According to him, the items were presented in a hodgepodge that displayed history in an incoherent demonstration.
However, some other reviewers were pleased to see a focus on the living Native Americans as opposed to documenting their history. This reaction is in keeping with the museum’s main intentions, which are not to present a linear history of Native Americans. The council of the NMAI knows that the stories of Native American Indians are unfamiliar to most Americans; therefore, the intentions of using these artifacts were to allow their stories to teach the public about American Indians within the world today. By leaving these artifacts with no detailed labels, interpretation is open, giving the viewer the ability to construct a meaning for that artifact during that time. Many viewers saw that The National Museum of the American Indian explores self-identity of Native American Indians through how they dress, what they think, and how they see themselves within the world today.
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“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)