In This Issue:

Museum's new director reveals his vision
Contemporary artists transcend definitions of Native identity
The National Museum of the American Indian
Buffy Sainte-Marie
NMAI News Briefs

Museum's new director reveals his vision

Gover combines low-key style with high ambitions for NMAI

Director Kevin Gover, National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C. Photo courtesy of Arizona State University

click images to access high resolution photo page

Kara Briggs, NMAI Newservice

(Washington D.C.) In his first days as the new director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian located across the street from the U.S. capitol, Kevin Gover came to work in the halls of power without the customary power suit.

Washington beltway formality has never been Gover's style. The 53-year-old lawyer was teaching law at Arizona State University when a Smithsonian search committee tapped him for the director's job last fall, with responsibility for a $43-million-a-year budget and a collection of nearly a million artifacts in three museum buildings.

Gover, a Pawnee and Comanche, introduced himself to his new Smithsonian staff wearing slacks and a black-and-gray Pendleton jacket.

"Kevin Gover brings his excellent credentials in the Indian world to the museum," said Henrietta Mann, who served on the Smithsonian search committee that selected him.

Gover was the Interior Department's Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs during the Clinton Administration. For him, the faint hum of Washington politics is as familiar as the reserve he shows in his current post where staff, the board of trustees, even the elders council, stops to listen to everything he says.

Yet he is quick to say, "I don't want everything to be about me." Instead he has bided his time collaborating on projects with colleagues. After seven months on the job, Gover is ready to express his vision for the museum.

It's a vision that grows less out of proclamation, and more out of collaboration with staff on many long-simmering projects.

He intends:

• to diversify the museum budget away from dependence on Congressional appropriations;
• to make NMAI a hub for indigenous scholars, beginning in K-12 and continuing to post-graduate;
• to renew the museum's relations with Indian Country;
• to guide exhibitions to strategically tell history in indigenous nations' own words.

"It's a remarkably sound institution," Gover observed. "It has magnificent facilities and a terrific staff, and it also has a strong philosophical core of giving voice to Native communities, of having them tell their own stories."

But preserving that core, he said, depends on transitioning away from dependence on federal dollars, which this year provided $31.5 million of the museum's $43.7 million budget. With a struggling U.S. economy and growing deficit, Gover is wary.

"We expect the federal appropriations for the museum will hold steady or quite possibly be reduced," he said. "So we have to be very creative not only in conserving our money, but also in seeking new sources of revenue."

Attorney W. Richard West, who is Cheyenne, served as founding director from the institution's creation by an act of Congress in 1989 until 2007. He raised $51 million, and built three museums under the National Museum of the American Indian's banner. The last of these, the museum across the street from the U.S. Capitol, opened in 2004 with fanfare that drew more than 20,000 Native Americans from around North America.

West also built an intellectual framework for NMAI as a museum of living Native American cultures and an institution where repatriation would go even further than the U.S. Native American Graves and Repatriation Act to return objects to Native nations.

But if West was grey suits, Gover is business-casual.

Gover brings a roll-up-your sleeves ethic about day-to-day operations. On his second day in the office, he told staff members to invite him to their meetings because that's where all the good decisions are made. He still joins the meetings daily when he's not traveling to meet Indian leaders or visit tribal museums.

His high profile as former Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs does create a certain wake. On the road, Native people frequently wait for a chance to greet Gover.

At this spring's National Indian Gaming Association Tradeshow in San Diego, Ernie Stevens Jr., the association chairman, announced from the podium, "We support Kevin, and we consider this a giant step for the museum."

Outside the tradeshow, Philip Harju, a spokesman for the Cowlitz Tribe in Washington state, told strangers about Feb. 14, 2000 when Gover, then at the bureau, signed federal acknowledgement of the Cowlitz Tribe. "That was an important day," Harju said, "and Kevin Gover deserves credit for doing the right thing for the whole country."

Maggie Bertin, NMAI's associate director for museum resources, observes that people relate to Gover "as if he were their favorite professor, listening and engaging intuitively and encouraging their very best efforts forward."

Gover admits that teaching at the Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law in Arizona suited him, to the point that he thought he'd cruise to retirement there.

But he may have laid the groundwork for his own return to Capitol Hill in a promise he made in 2000. As director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he apologized for its "legacy of racism and inhumanity" before a gathering of 300 tribal leaders.

That statement, which Gover says he drew from the Alcoholics Anonymous guidance on making amends and from the writings of author Marianne Williamson, was cited in 2005 as an example of the "perfect apology" by psychiatrist and author Aaron Lazare in his book On Apology. Some of what made Gover's apology unusually effective was this statement: "By accepting this legacy, we accept also the moral responsibility of putting things right."

"The apology took a great deal of courage, a great deal of passion for all his relations," said Henrietta Mann, now president of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribal College in Southwest Oklahoma. "Maybe the Bureau of Indian Affairs was a little too entrenched for him to do something about it. Maybe coming to the museum was a continuance of the apology."

Soon after his arrival Gover, the legal scholar, stepped into a leading role in the museum's preparation for a major exhibition titled "Treaties: Great Nations in Their Own Words," scheduled to open in 2011.

"Treaties" is likely to answer complaints the museum has sometimes received for not being more aggressive in its critique of U.S. conduct. This exhibition will tell the story of U.S.-Indian relations with "complete candor," Gover said.

"It will be in some ways an edgier show than we have ever attempted before," he added.

Gover will be talking about "Treaties" and other aspects of his vision for the National Museum of the American Indian in the coming months as he travels the U.S., on tour to achieve what is internally called Renewing Connections. The connections are with Native Americans, defined as the core constituency in the museum's founding legislation.

Gover clearly enjoys his new role at NMAI, and in this creative setting he is publicly expressing more sides of himself than Indian Country has seen before.

"When you are a political appointee working in an executive agency, every issue is a battle with winners and losers," Gover said. "Here at the museum, everyone can be winners."

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Contemporary artists transcend definitions of Native identity

A new exhibit yields an array of fresh answers to the question of what it means to be American Indian

Steven Yazzie	Dustinn Craig	Nadia Myre	Kent Monkman
click images to access high resolution photo page

Kara Briggs, NMAI E-Newservice

(New York) The National Museum of the America Indian's George Gustav Heye Center is showing a provocative exhibit this summer by a new generation of Native American artists.

Using everything from packing tape and hub caps to video and paint, these artists are part of what "Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World" co-curator Gerald McMaster sees as a generational shift away from a tight focus on Native identity to the exploration of diverse individual identities.

"When you go through centuries of adjustment, as Native people have, then pride in cultural identity becomes important," said McMaster, who is Plains Cree and curator of Canadian art at the Art Gallery of Ontario. "What has happened in the last while is a shaking and loosening. Young artists have gone beyond the identity of Indian."

The show premiered at the Heard Museum in Phoenix last winter and spring. It moved to the Heye Center in lower Manhattan on June 7 and continues through Sept. 21.

Planning for "Remix," which is co-curated by Joe Baker, Delaware, began in 2004. McMaster, who then worked at NMAI, and Baker, who then worked at the Heard, decided to look into what contemporary Native American artists were doing. They surveyed the work of young artists from tribes in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.

The 15 artists selected, aged 28 to 43, use art to grapple with their identity. The ideas that emerge are not only Native American, but also from other ethnic or racial backgrounds, their educations, and their experiences.

Some of the resulting pieces show their blended identities more overtly than others. Nadia Myre, an installation artist who is Anishinaabe, shows video of herself paddling down a rough river in a canoe she made half of birch bark and half of aluminum. She laughed, "There's a big metaphor in that, isn't there?"

Hector Ruiz, a Mexican and Kickapoo artist, takes issue with the curators' idea that his and other work in the show are somehow past being Indian.

"That post-identity idea was a '60s and '70s thing," he said. "I think identity is still a big part of the work, whether that is old identity, new identity or the forging of a new identity."

Pieces like his wood carving titled "God of War," in which a white man with clenched teeth and six arms swirls up from a rattlesnake tail, are less obviously Indian than others in the show. But he said they come from his perspective, which distinctly reflects influences from Kickapoo culture, Mexico and an urban Phoenix neighborhood.

Dustinn Craig, a White Mountain Apache, believes that the Native identity is more powerful than generational differences of expression. He presents a high definition film that juxtaposes images of young skateboarders on his reservation with photos of the same young men dressed in the style of Apache scouts 100 years ago. "Being a White Mountain Apache will manifest itself in whatever time you live," Craig said.

Steven Yazzie, who is Navajo, Laguna and Welsh, shows an installation piece constructed from hub caps he collected from Phoenix roadsides and cut into squares. Titled "Sleeping With Jefferson," he said the piece depicts the grid system, an unnatural squared off system, that President Thomas Jefferson devised for measuring land.

"I was in Arizona to be very connected to the land," Yazzie said. "Now I am a total city Indian. In my gallery work, Navajo or Native American is always identified, but there is mix of everyone's races represented in this show."

To highlight the diversity of the artists in "Remix," the curators list on tags not only the artists' tribal affiliation but also their other races, nationalities and ethnic identities.

In paintings such as "She Must be Speaking to the Spirits," Luis Gutierrez, trained in England and living in Phoenix, draws on with his own struggles with multiple sclerosis and his enduring connections to his birth mother, who also suffered from MS. He said he tries to gently combine all the identities, Native, Mexican, Chicano and Christian that come from his background.

"I have Yaqui on both side of my family," he said. "But what does that mean to me as an urban Chicano man."

Yet some of the identities that art has imposed on Native people need to be overturned, said Kent Monkman, a Cree, English and Irish artist from Toronto. In his painting, "Icon for a New Empire" Monkman shows an artist, modeled on George Catlin or Edward Curtis, kissing a statue of an Indian at the end of the trail. In the kiss, the stereotype comes to life.

"Catlin was in love with his own tragic, romantic construction," Monkman said.

David Hannan, a Métis artist from Toronto, re-imagines standard imagery of Indian art as three-dimensional sculptures using taxidermy forms and layer upon layer of packing tape. His hanging sculpture of coyotes chasing deer looks almost crystalline in the light.

"You can have a sense of identity but not be bound by it," he said.

Nadia Myre, the Anishinaabe installation artist from Quebec, said "Remix" artists aren't the only ones exploring new ways of doing their art. "You have very traditional people who are learning to paint so they can retell their traditional stories in European paint," Myre said. "I am not a traditional person, but I am relearning traditional methods of working with materials to make work in a contemporary way."

Maybe, said Kevin Gover, the director of the National Museum of the American Indian, the museum is one place where Native artists can explore all parts of who they are.

"We are sometimes so obsessed with being a part of a tribe that we forget to be individuals," he said.
The exhibit is open through September 21. It can be viewed online at
http://www.American Indian.si.edu/exhibitions/remix/.

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The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian

Photo © Judy Davis/Hoachlander Davis Photography

(Washington D.C. ) The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian at dawn.

Click on photo to access print resolution version.

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Buffy Sainte-Marie

Photo by Katherine Fogden, NMAI E-Newservice

(Washington D.C. ) Buffy Sainte-Marie is musician and songwriter. She spoke and performed in the Rasmuson Theater at NMAI in March, 2008.

Click on photo to access print resolution version.

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NMAI News Briefs

Artists Sought for December Art Market

The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian is seeking applications from artists who want to participate in the NMAI Art Market on Dec. 6 and 7, 2008.

The annual market is held both at NMAI on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and at the museum's George Gustav Heye Center in New York City.

The museum seeks a diverse selection of Native art from the U.S. and Canada, as well as Central and South America.

Applications are due by Sept. 15, 2008. Submit them to Linda Martin for the market in Washington, D.C., or to Shawn Termin for the market in New York City.

Please download the vendor information and application form at www.AmericanIndian.si.edu.

Cherokee Summer Intern at NMAI

Allison Meadows, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma who lives in Ballwin, Mo., is an intern at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., this summer.

"Working at NMAI has allowed me to explore my heritage and become more familiar with that part of myself and my family," she said.

Among Meadows' varied duties at the museum, she is helping to prepare for the closing of an exhibit, "Listening to Our Ancestors," which featured the culture of nations of the Northern Pacific Coast. She is also doing research for a skateboarding event and exhibition focused on skateboarding culture within the Native American community, a project planned for next summer.

This is her second summer internship at the museum.

Last spring she graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history from Truman State University in Kirksville, Mo. She will begin work on her Master of Science degree at the University of Oxford in England, a step inspired by her experiences at the National Museum of the American Indian.

"My internship last year proved to me that I really enjoy working in the museum setting and that I want to pursue a career within that realm," Meadows said.

Wyandot Summer Intern at NMAI

Sarah Glass, who is Wyandot and a recent graduate of Harvard University, has spent the summer interning at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian's Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Md.

Her hometown is Bloomington-Normal, Ill.

Glass, who received a Bachelor of Arts in social anthropology and archaeology, is a curatorial research assistant working on "Infinity of Nations," an exhibit that is scheduled to open at the George Gustav Heye Center in New York in 2010.

"The sheer amount of attention that goes to planning absolutely every detail of a museum exhibit is staggering," she said. "Ordinary museum patrons have no idea that their entire experience of the exhibition is debated and discussed, often for years before the exhibit opens."

This exhibit is a survey of the National Museum of the American Indian's entire collection, which covers North and South America and includes over 800,000 items. Glass is helping to research the history of about 700 objects. She is participating in interviews with Native peoples and other experts, and organizing the research for the exhibit's curators.

"I have dug up information on everything from Sitting Bull's medicine drum, to Mayan jade earspools, to Eskimo ivory knives, to objects from my own tribe, the Wyandot," she said.

Ecuadorian Summer Intern at NMAI

Barbara Molina Neira, a student at the Universidad de Cuenca in Ecuador, is interning this summer at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

Molina is working to expand the museum's database of Latin American institutions and performers to help with a future exhibition about the Inca Road constructed by the Inca on the West Coast of South America. She is also is helping to coordinate the museum's summer concert series, often hosting performers and working with the public.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and geography from the Universidad de Cuenca. She is working on a thesis paper about what it would take to create a folk life museum in her hometown of Cuenca, Ecuador.

"My idea is to create a public space to share our ways of life with everyone," Molina said. "In my experience at the National Museum of the American Indian, I realize more important than the objects are the people, and the ways they use their objects to continue their cultural beliefs for the next generations."

Sault Ste. Marie Intern at NMAI

Allison Krebs, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, is 2008 summer intern at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian's Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Md. She is helping to expand the museum's outreach to tribal colleges, urban Indian centers and Indian nations.

"The National Museum of the American Indian is a truly unique institution living at the center of the contentious terrain which lies between Indian Country and standard museum practice," Krebs said. "It is the intangible outreach to Indian Country, to the museum's constituents in Indian Country, that I am working with during my internship."

Krebs holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in geology from Yale University, a master's degree in information resources from the University of Arizona and is working on a Tribal Legal Studies Certificate from that University of California at Los Angeles.

After a summer at the museum, which opened across the street from the U.S. Capitol in 2004, Krebs is excited by the people she has met, including staff and indigenous people from around the world. She intends to stay in touch with the contacts she has made at NMAI.

"It is clear that the National Museum of the American Indian could become a lifetime habit well worth maintaining," she said.

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The NMAI E-Newservice is supported by National Museum of the American Indian membership dollars. For information about membership, go to http://www.AmericanIndian.si.edu/subpage.cfm?second=membership&subpage=support.

The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian is located in Washington, D.C. The Museum also operates the George Gustav Heye Center in New York City, and the National Museum of the American Indian Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Md.

The National Museum of the American Indian is committed to advancing knowledge and understanding of the Native cultures of the Western Hemisphere, past, present and future, through partnership with Native people and others. The museum works to support the continuance of culture, traditional values, and transitions in contemporary Native life.

The NMAI E-Newservice is a free service to news media serving Native America from the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. The NMAI E-Newservice provides articles, photographs and editorial for news outlets to use free of charge. Please credit the NMAI E-Newservice, or use bylines as provided. Kara Briggs, a Yakama and Snohomish journalist, is the editor. She owns Red Hummingbird Media Corp., which contracts with the National Museum of the American Indian to provide this service. Contact her at editor@nmaie-newservice.com or by phone at 503-577-0012 if you have questions, comments or requests, or if you wish to subscribe.

Kara Briggs, Editor
Eileen Maxwell, NMAI Director of Public Affairs
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