NMAI_AmericansAttachmentJ.6.pdf

Attachment J.6 – Americans Content Details NOTE: This document builds on section 2.3 of this solicitation. They should be reviewed in tandem as elements of 2.3 are not repeated in the attachment. The attachment primarily provides more detail for the event sections.

Exhibition Main Message To understand how the United States emerged as a powerful nation and what it means to be American, one must understand that the United States and American Indians are deeply entangled in history, national consciousness, and contemporary experience.

The Event Sections - Framework Pocahontas, the Trail of Tears, and the Battle of Little Bighorn were selected because they feature Native Americans, because they are familiar to most visitors, and because they are embedded in the cultural and visual landscape of the United States. One additional section, the California Gold Rush, highlights a major event in U.S. history with a devastating outcome for Native people that is not widely known.

Our assumption is that while some visitors know a great deal about these events, far more know very little. The events operate as a gateway to demonstrate common ground and a shared history by establishing personal connections to each of the events. We intend to show the largeness of the events and their centrality in United States history. We will also reveal how their echoes and afterimages surround us today.

Things that do not interest us:

• victim narratives

• simplistically debunking the established histories

• presenting the “Indian side”

• boring our visitors

• creating a book on the wall

Success for the exhibition is visitors:

• becoming aware of personal connections with American Indians they had not noticed or thought about previously

• recognizing those connections exist because of the profound and momentous impact of Native Americans on the United States

• considering that perhaps these understandings suggest a shared legacy and a future still to be written

• gaining a new type of literacy—a way to read and interpret the Indian imagery that is all around them

The Event Sections Details

Pocahontas Our narrative shows her to be a central figure in the first successful English colony in the world, which became the wealthiest and most powerful state in the richest country on the planet. Jamestown’s gold was tobacco, cultivated by Pocahontas’s husband John Rolfe. Their sizable estate, left to their son, became the cornerstone of the birthplace of four of the first six American presidents.

Pocahontas lives in the rarified air shared by just a handful of historical figures (i.e. Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Joan of Arc) who’ve maintained superstar status for centuries. Ships, towns, and counties are named in her honor. She was invoked by abolitionists, Confederate soldiers, and 20th century lawmakers. She has been considered a traitor, a spy, a diplomat, temptress, a mother of two nations, and royalty. Al Jolson, Peggy Lee, and Neil Young sang about her.

Why has Pocahontas meant so many different things to so many different people over the past 400 years? Why is she still around? What does she mean today?

Trail of Tears Remembered as a tale of starving, freezing Cherokee marched at gunpoint on muddy roads, the epic story of the removal of entire Indian nations in the American South was a key element in the transformation of the Mississippi Valley into the Cotton Kingdom, a global economic powerhouse built on Indian land and slave labor. It was a vast, modern, and expensive federal project that took more than a decade and created the largest economic boom since the Revolution. No event in the first half of the 19th century changed the United States more. The sentimental national memory that focuses on Cherokee suffering is a 20th century invention that miniaturizes the scope of Indian Removal, at the same time seeking to atone for past violations.

Visitors will experience the decades-long national debate that led to the passage of the Indian Removal Act, focusing on the humanitarian arguments that Removal was good for Indians. It was instead a catastrophe.

The Trail of Tears is a phrase with a long history, though one that began nearly a hundred years after the event itself. The country had forgotten about it. Indian activists staged campaigns that made it part of national consciousness. Now, everyone knows the phrase, few know about Removal. Today it is invoked to reference government injustice generally. A growing national debate has emerged about replacing Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill.

What we remember, and what we forget about the Trail of Tears tells us a lot about the United States.

Personal connections are established through the route itself, the modernist project of the Removal machinery, the ongoing fascination with the Cherokee, as evidenced by motor vehicles, the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, and Johnny Cash.

Gold Rush The Gold Rush is remembered and celebrated. Yet, what happened to Native California—mass slaughter and marginalization—is forgotten and ignored. This section is about amnesia, and a slow process of coming to terms with a dark chapter of the American past.

Battle of the Little Big Horn The Battle of the Little Bighorn could be considered the 19th century’s version of the Kennedy assassination. It became an instant national obsession that never quite went away. Conspiracy theories, assignment of blame, poems, songs, novels, and reenactments began almost immediately and continue to the present. We ask, why does the country remember, among all the wars with Indians, a battle that the United States lost?

We argue that the defeat of the best generals and soldiers in the American military, a week before the country’s 100th birthday, was a cathartic event that valorized and sanctified Manifest Destiny. It shaped and informed America’s idea of itself. Little Bighorn gave Manifest Destiny a worthy opponent. It proved that making America required a titanic, gritty campaign, one paid in blood.

The reenactments and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West were followed by movies and then television. Previously reviled, with the Indian wars finally over, Sitting Bull become a national icon. Through reenactments and evolving commercialization and popularizations, Plains Indians have come to epitomize much of the world’s perception of all American Indians, concealing their vast diversity and changing identities. Today, the Plains warrior on horseback, equipped with feathers and a Winchester, is the most famous image of Indians, one frozen in time from the 1870s.

We show how American military’s policy of naming weapons systems after Indian tribes is one outcome from this valorization of the military skill of Native Americans, as is the naming of sports teams for similar reasons. You can find them everywhere in 21st century, shaped by that moment in 1876.