Day Six: Reclaiming Space at the Heye Center
What does the decolonization of a museum look like? Further up the Atlantic coast, the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine defines their program of decolonization, “at a minimum, [as] sharing authority for the documentation and interpretation of Native culture.” When I browsed Infinity of Nations in the National Museum of the American Indian’s George Gustav Heye Center, I marveled at how these artifacts were presented as aspects of living cultures thanks to the Native American educators featured in their digital interpretive elements. It’s a far cry from being displayed as relics of primitive tribes, acquired and studied to “unlock the mysteries of the red man,” as George Gustav Heye, the collector and namesake of this museum, stated as his mission.
Yet what is it when this institution, which internally is decolonizing, resides in a building that embodies successive histories of colonialism, commerce, and domination? The NMAI resides in the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Customs House, a monument to the commercial power of the young nation, designed by architect Cass Gilbert in 1899. Looking outside, one sees sculptures made in tribute to seafaring nations and empires, which the United States saw itself as a successor to. Nearly a decade later and halfway across the world, another burgeoning empire, Japan, had plans to build a similar monument to their dominion of a newly acquired colonial possession: the Korean peninsula.
If, as Gilbert believed, public buildings “reveal the ‘imponderable elements of life and character,’” we can learn about the “life and character” of their nations especially when we look inside. In the second-floor rotunda, a series of paintings depicted scenes of seaside commerce in New York alternated by trompe-l’œil paintings of notable European explorers, ranging from John Cabot to Henry Hudson, from Amerigo Vespucci to Christopher Columbus.
Even the building, which replaced Fort Amsterdam, the beachhead of Dutch and later British colonial rule, seems to replace yet restage that history of conquest. Similar reasons were given for the destruction and replacement of the Japanese General Government Building in Seoul, South Korea: housing national heritage in a colonial building restages that painful history of colonialism, which saw the destruction of all aspects of Korean culture and identity. (I highly recommend Jung Joon Lee’s “The national museum as palimpsest: Postcolonial politics and the National Museum of Korea,” in National Museums: New Studies from Around the World.)
Set against a background of developments in the past few years ranging from the inauguration of Indigenous People’s Day to the toppling of colonizer monuments in South Africa, I felt quite astonished that the National Museum of the American Indian would reside in a building that not only celebrates a major driving factor for colonization but also key colonizers in history. Perhaps it may be the influence of their neighbors, the National Archives, dedicated to preserving the nation’s documentary history.
Perhaps, by keeping these vestiges of a past that once memorialized colonialism near a museum that continually endeavors to move away from such a paradigm, we can be reminded. We can be reminded of how far things have come since then. We can also be reminded, especially if such an arrangement restages that history, that decolonization is an ongoing process that continues to demand action and responsibility from all members of our national society.
