Like thousands of Native Americans, Rick West's ancestors were driven from their lands in Colorado and Wyoming and relocated to what was then called Indian Territory, on windswept plains north of Texas. Mr. West, who would grow up to become a prominent Washington lawyer and lobbyist for Indian rights, grew up in a log cabin, where his father - a sculptor and painter - taught his two sons Indian ways. As boys, they even danced in full attire on American television in the 1950s, when Rick met Jay Silverheels, an Iroquois who played a character named Tonto on a popular TV western. He was the so-called faithful Indian companion of a white hero named the Lone Ranger.
"Jay Silverheels, quite frankly, did a great deal for Native people in Hollywood at a time when Native people, as actors, could not even get their foot in the door," said Rick West. "Media's treatment of Native people, especially in film, didn't really change until the 1990s. It was full of stereotypes of [us] as kind of uni-dimensional Native people: barbaric, often savage, without feeling, without complexity, none of which is true about either Native cultures or Native people. The arrival of the film was really a pivot point in commercial film, in which there was added complexity and depth to the Native characters in that film, which, interestingly enough, involved a lot of Native actors for the first time in history, actually."
Although Mr. West uses the term Native people, he says he is not troubled by the designation of the new facility as the museum of the American Indian.
"I will not say that none of us distinguishes between 'American Indian' and 'Native American,' but the fact is that, as Native people of this hemisphere, we often use neither term," he said. "If you ask who I am, I will say that I am Cheyenne, or in our own language, 'Tsitsistas.' The term 'American Indian' to most people indigenous to this country is not necessarily pejorative [offensive]. It simply shows that Columbus was lost at the time he arrived in this hemisphere. [thinking he had arrived in South Asia, Christopher Columbus referred to the Natives he beheld as Indians.] The term 'Native American,' on the other hand, is slightly confusing. In a given roomful of people, almost everybody there is probably native American, even if they are not indigenous to this hemisphere, simply because they were born in this country. So both terms have their drawbacks. It is largely a debate that occurred in the non-Indian world, not the Native world."
The bulk of the 800,000 artifacts in the new museum's initial collection come from a much different sort of Indian museum in New York, founded by a wealthy eccentric named George Gustav Heye. He scoured Indian lands for artifacts, while paying little attention to the people themselves.
: But I don't want to demonize him, in the sense that he is representative of lots of others like him at that time.
: Others have demonized him, though, as having the safari mentality. And yet you have named your education and exhibition center in New York after him.
: As well we should. I think it was entirely appropriate. He was indeed of a rather colonial mentality. But the fact is, I would not be sitting here, talking with you about the National Museum of the American Indian, were it not for the efforts of George Gustav Heye.
The new Indian museum's curvilinear design and water treatments - including a free-running stream next to the building - are the product of conversations with Native peoples throughout the Western Hemisphere. Rick West has received letters critical of the planned use of high technology to produce interactive exhibits and data bases accessible to Indian communities everywhere. This is Disneyland, they say: untraditional, and therefore un-Indian.
"And you know what I discovered is that every single one of those letters came from a non-Native," said Rick West. "That's not the way that Native people themselves will look at the matter. We have always been willing to engage new technologies in the preservation of ourselves and our cultures."
To an expected four to six million visitors each year, Rick West says, the new Smithsonian museum will tell a story that goes back many millennia, before whites invaded their midst and eventually decimated much of Indian culture. It is a history, he says, that Native people will tell in their own, unfiltered words. He adds that, in raising more than $100 million to build the museum, fundraisers have never played what he calls the guilt card.