American Indians -- Sept. 19, 2004

  -- A weekly feature on This Week.

Voices/Images

More than 15,000 Native Americans are expected to turn out for Tuesday's opening of The National Museum of the American Indian. It took 15 years and more than $200 million to build this spectacular near the U.S. Capitol. Founding director W. Richard West, Jr. — a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes — gives This Week a first look:

"The National Museum of the American Indian's home on the National Mall results from years of consultations with native peoples themselves, who told us what they wanted to see in this building for it to be really a native place. They wanted curvilinearity. They wanted an organic form. They wanted it to look like the carved rock that it actually is. There are few straight lines in nature, and of course, nature is the inspiration for much of native design.

"Its place here on the mall, I think, is a remarkable physical and spiritual marker for the native peoples of this hemisphere. But it also is living proof that native people still exist. There are some 35 to 40 million of us, indigenous people throughout this hemisphere at the present time. So the museum is about that huge time spectrum. And that's one its messages.

"Its second message is that native peoples themselves are thoroughly capable of interpreting and representing themselves, in their own voices and through their own eyes. Even though, historically, we have always been interpreted from a third-party standpoint. Indians are not important just because we make beautiful objects, even though the tendency is always to talk about Indians in terms of beautiful objects.

"It finally brings to the fore the cultural heritage of every citizen in this country. Whether you are native or non-native, and that in my view is why even though we arrived belatedly, it is a message and a gift, if you will, from the people who are already here to all of our visitors who may descend from those who came afterwards."