National Museum of the American Indian

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN. The National Museum of the American Indian of the Smithsonian Institution (NMAI) began as the private collection of a wealthy New York banker, George Gustav Heye (1874–1957). In 1903 Heye began a half century of voracious acquisition of Native American artifacts, during which he dispatched agents throughout the Western Hemisphere to obtain objects and collections from Native peoples. In the first decade, Heye worked in collaboration with the University Museum in Philadelphia and with Franz Boas at Columbia University. In 1916, however, Heye established, over Boas's strenuous objections, his independent institution in Manhattan: the Heye Foundation and the Museum of the American Indian. The goal of the new museum was as simple as it was comprehensive: "the preservation of everything pertaining to our American tribes." Over the next fifteen years Heye established a publication series, an anthropological library, a storage facility in the Bronx, and a research and collecting agenda in archaeology and ethnography.

The death of two of Heye's major benefactors in 1928 and the onset of economic depression a year later effectively ended Heye's ambitious program of acquisition. Over the next twenty-five years Heye continued collecting and sponsoring expeditions, but on a greatly reduced level. After his death in 1957, Heye's institution fell into disrepair; when the museum's sad state came to public attention in the mid-1970s, nearly fifteen years of debate and negotiation ensued. This resulted finally, in 1990, in the transfer of the Heye artifact collection, archives, and library in their entirety to the Smithsonian Institution, where they constitute the core of the National Museum of the American Indian. The transfer also stipulated that human remains and funerary objects from the Heye collection be repatriated to Native peoples where possible.

Building upon its core collection of nearly one million artifacts, the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian preserves, studies, and exhibits the histories and cultures of Native American peoples; the NMAI also works in close collaboration with Native peoples to protect, sustain, and reaffirm traditional beliefs and encourage artistic expression.

There are several NMAI facilities. Opened in 1994, the George Gustav Heye Center of NMAI, located at the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House in lower Manhattan, is an educational and exhibition facility with public programs of music, dance, and film. The Cultural Resources Center outside Washington, D.C., in Suitland, Maryland, invites Native and non-Native scholars to utilize its library and archival collections. The central facility—the Smithsonian's last museum on the Mall—was scheduled to open in 2003 and serve as the major exhibition space, as well as a venue for ceremony and education. Finally, a "virtual museum" is available through the NMAI Web sites.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Force, Roland W. Politics and the Museum of the American Indian: The Heye and the Mighty. Honolulu, Hawaii: Mechas Press, 1999.

"The History of the Museum." Indian Notes and Monographs, Miscellaneous Series No. 55. New York: Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 1956.

Kidwell, Clara Sue. "Every Last Dishcloth: The Prodigious Collecting of George Gustav Heye." In Collecting Native America, 1870–1960. Edited by Shepard Krech III and Barbara A. Hail. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999, 232–258.

National Museum of the American Indian. Home page at http://www.nmai.si.edu.

National Museum of the American Indian Act, Public Law 101– 185, 101st Congress (28 November 1989).

Wallace, Kevin. "Slim-Shin's Monument." New Yorker (19 November 1960).

Curtis M. Hinsley

See also Native Americans .