Like Jesus Speaking Dakota: My Visit to Another Native American museum
When I was six years old, I remember standing on tippy toes over a mummified corpse in the Field Museum in Chicago when my instructor, Mrs. Cleery, told me she had something she wanted me to see. I followed her past the mummies to a dark, less populated wing where we found ourselves vastly outnumbered by rows of faceless mannequins. Mrs. Cleery looked down at me with the most wholesome smile and asked “you said you’re Menominee, right?” I nodded. She gestured to one mannequin in the center of the case, standing tall and white with its face looking off into the distance. The mannequin wore clothes of tan hide and fur, adorned with a vest of elaborate beadwork. “Look, these are your people,” Mrs. Cleery said to me. In her defense, I think her intentions were good. I did not know how to express the complicated feelings that arose staring up at a mannequin that was not dressed like any Menominee I had ever known. There was a sense of pride, sure, but also a deep kind of sadness that I did not know how to make sense of. Standing in a similar wing in a different museum, several states away and over two decades later, I still do not know what to make of it.
In the spring of 2018, I visited the Heritage Center in Bismarck, North Dakota as part of a school trip. I had heard a lot about the Heritage Center from a former instructor who was very excited for us to see the American Indian history exhibits inside. As someone who loves museums, I was earnestly excited to go as well. Being centered in the Plains, the museum primarily covered artifacts and the histories of those particular tribes — the Three Tribes of the Fort Berthold reservation (Mandan, Arikara, and Hidatsa) as well as the Lakota and Dakota. As we entered the exhibit, the hall outlined North Dakota history in comparison to global history beginning in 11,000 BC. As we walked along the timeline, the voices of elders welcomed us in Dakota. Along with tools and pottery, the exhibit offered huts and teepees that one could actually enter and sit in. It also featured a circular room which gave the feeling of being in a Mandan village as it would have existed pre-contact. My indigenous colleagues and I stood in that room and commented on how often the advanced pre-contact civilizations are credited to the work of aliens even now.
Further along in the exhibit, there was a video projection of an elder woman speaking about powwows, trying to explain what they are and what their purposes are. My colleague and I, both of us former dancers, stood underneath that projection and watched a video of a powwow from the 1990s. I was told that the multimedia portions of the exhibit were a recent addition. The American Indian wing was very experiential: in addition to the multimedia components, there were also sections of different types of hide that were meant to be touched while visitors made guesses about what each type of hide or fur could be used for. The jewelry, pottery and bonework were elaborate and sophisticated, showing a timeline of incredibly fine arrowheads which were terrifying to imagine piercing the skin. The displays gave detailed description of hunting methods, as well as how communities would utilize different parts of buffalo.
Much of the wing was dedicated to warfare, as one might expect. There were grand tapestries painted with representations of battles, massacres. Toward the end of the wing, my former instructor caught my attention and beckoned me over. Prior to the trip, he had told me a very beautiful story about Sitting Bull’s death and how a herd of horses had stampeded over the ground where he was buried, knocking over the headstone and smashing it to pieces. He repeated the story as we stood over the headstone. Just above it, there was also a painting which had been hanging in Sitting Bull’s house when he had been arrested and which had been deliberately slashed during the confrontation.
While the Sitting Bull display was very powerful, what really caught my attention was a seemingly disconnected display just a few feet beyond it: a small mannequin, about the size of a child, dressed in a tattered blue uniform. Beside the mannequin, on a couple of shelves were some tattered old paper things: a book, a card, a ticket. Upon closer inspection, the boy’s uniform looked stiff, itchy and uncomfortable — the sort of thing that as a child with sensitive skin would have made me miserable. The fabric was torn, shredded at the cuffs. It looked like something a prisoner of war would wear. The small card beside it identified it as the uniform of a child who attended Fort Totten Indian School, found in a dresser in the boys dormitory, estimated to be from some time between 1900 and 1940.
Staring at it, it was difficult to believe that such a uniform could have been worn by someone my grandfather’s age.
In a display right beside it, there was a slightly taller, more feminine mannequin covered in a faded white apron, stained dark brown across the bodice. It had been found beneath the floorboards of the girls dormitory at Fort Totten. Between these two, more small markers of forced assimilation: a pair of child-sized work gloves, itchy and worn, found at Fort Totten Indian School.
On the shelf, the book was a Bible, translated into Dakota printed in 1865. I stared at that Bible for a long time, wondering what the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant sounds like in Dakota. The ticket was a rations card. There was an allotment marker. My instructor made a comment to me, breaking through my trance: “who would have thought, huh? Bismarck, North Dakota.” Much like I had as a child, I tried to articulate some of what was going through my mind but I found it difficult, even to someone who I deeply respect and consider, in many ways, to be “one of the good ones.” I mumbled something about my internal conflict, trying to recognize that it wasn’t my heritage to connect with while also feeling very acutely the chip on my shoulder about our shared losses through colonialism, thinking back to that day at the Field Museum as a child when I stared up at a mannequin of my own people and found that what I think of when I think “Menominee person” is not a hunter and gatherer in buckskin and beads, but a person with features like my mother’s trying to maintain their indigeneity through a thick veil of colonization. What does it mean that for someone with blood relatives who had gone through a boarding school they seldom spoke of, I felt a weirdly strong connection to what I was looking at, and the pain of that was more real, more clearly felt in my DNA, than anything I felt looking at the clothing supposedly worn by my ancestors as they (we?) took down great mammoths on the same land where I ran and played as a child? I looked back at the displays about warfare and massacres, the display about Sitting Bull, then turned my attention back to the trappings of assimilation, preserved in glass. I mumbled something woefully inadequate that probably came off as rude, because he said “well you got me there” and we parted.
Ultimately, I think that the main thing that this museum wanted visitors to take away was that Native Americans are part of a rich history of North Dakota. North Dakota is painted as the site of numerous conflicts, both physical and ideological. As I walked through, reading these emotionally detached passages about great battles and eventually wandering over to a display glorifying North Dakota energy extraction, I thought about how close this museum is to Cannon Ball, the site of one of the great Indian battles of the modern era, where so many of my friends put their bodies on the line in front of dogs and guns and freezing water trying to protect the elders and the river and all of those things they hold so dear, the same battles playing out over the course of decades, centuries. I wanted to yell “these people are still here. I have met them! They’re still here, they’re still fighting!” but I sensed it would have been frowned upon.
On the way out of the museum, I stopped and bought a print of Custer’s death announcement, a purchase which puzzled everyone in my group. I believe that this museum was trying to demonstrate to visitors that there were once great civilizations here on the Plains. In its own way, perhaps it was even trying to demonstrate why those great civilizations have fallen so far from their former glory. In execution, however, I think that story will always be different to whomever is experiencing it because the clashing of worlds means that some things never fully translate, like a stampede of wild horses over the resting place of one of the world’s few great men, like the teachings of Jesus in a language he was never meant to speak.
