Respecting Non-Western Sacred Objects: An A:shiwi Ahayu:da (Zuni war god), the Museum of the American Indian–Heye Foundation, and the Museum of Modern Art

By Cécile R. Ganteaume, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian

For the last few weeks, American Indians, the international art world, U.S. State Department officials, indigenous rights activists, and intellectual and cultural property rights lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic have been discussing the proposed sale of Hopi Katsina “friends” (often mistakenly called masks) at a Paris auction house. The Hopi, who live in northern Arizona, and their supporters tried to delay, if not halt, the sale. Hopi Katsina friends are among the most sacred Hopi ritual objects. Katsinam (the plural of Katsina) are spiritual beings that live in the peaks of the San Francisco Mountains and bring blessings to the Hopi. When worn during Kastina ceremonies, the friend—the spirit of Katsina—is united with the spirit of man. On April 12, 2013, a French judge ruled that “the claim that Hopi cultural patrimony is exclusively their property has no legal basis according to French law” and that the auction house could proceed with the sale..

The Hopi effort is the latest prominently reported instance of an American Indian tribe trying to regain its sacred objects from the international art world and market. American Indians have been seeking the return of their sacred objects since well before the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990), the federal law that helps enable the return to tribes of certain categories of objects including sacred objects, held by U.S. museums.

Almost thirty years ago, on September 27, 1984, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City opened a highly anticipated and soon to be celebrated exhibition. “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern was curated by William Rubin (1927–2006), then MoMA’s esteemed director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, in collaboration with Kirk Varnadoe (1946–2003), a professor within the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. On display in the exhibition was to be an A:shiwi (Zuni) Ahayu:da (war god) borrowed from the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, (now the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin). The MoMA exhibition, and its multi-authored, two-volume catalogue, explored the influence of tribal art and culture in modern art’s development “from Gauguin at the turn of the century to the Abstract Expressionists around 1950.” When the exhibition opened, the New York Times heralded it as “an immensely important show.” 

 

“People are talking about: The man from MoMA” by Barbara Rose in Vogue (August, 1984. Vol. 174(8), pages 357–361 & 416) with illustrations of the A:shiwi (Zuni) Ahayu:da (war god) in the collections of the Museum für Völkerkunde and the Paul Klee painting, Mask of Fear. Page 357 @ Condé Nast. Used with permission.

In one of their exhibition galleries, the curators planned to juxtapose the painted wood Ahayu:da “sculpture” with a Paul Klee oil painting, Mask of Fear (1932), to discuss what they found to be the striking affinity between the “primitive” and “modern” “works of art.” The Museum für Völkerkunde acquired the Ahayu:da in 1880, and Klee, the Swiss-born artist closely associated with the Bauhaus movement, was known to have visited the museum several times while the Ahayu:da was on display. Like many avant-garde artists of his time, Klee was keenly interested in the formal vocabulary of the visual arts of non-Western peoples; he wrote on the subject more than once. William Rubin was convinced that Klee was familiar with the Museum für Völkerkunde Ahayu:da and that it “consciously or unconsciously” influenced his Mask of Fear. In the catalogue essay, “Modernist Primitivism: An Introduction,” Rubin wrote of the works’ “striking similarities,” comparing the oval-shaped heads; the single arrow projecting from the top of each head; the long, narrow noses and absence of mouths; and the horizontal line crossing each forehead. He suggested that “the curious multiple legs” protruding from Klee’s head were a transformation of the feathers projecting from the Ahayu:da’s chin. Klee’s painting was “a modernist transformation,” Rubin wrote, of the A:shiwi Ahayu:da “sculpture.” And this was how the curators intended to display the A:shiwi Ahayu:da from the Museum für Völkerkunde in “Primitivism” in the 20th Century: as a “primitive sculpture” with “conceptual complexity and aesthetic subtlety” whose exhibition and publication in the West, along with the appearance of other “primitive” works of art, had a great impact on Modernist aesthetic sensibilities. (See William Rubin, “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, vol. 1. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984, pages 29–32.)

But as it happened, by 1984 the A:shiwi were already actively pursuing the return of their Ahayu:da—all wrongfully removed from shrines on their reservation. Cared for by A:shiwi religious leaders, Ahayu:da are powerful guardian beings who protect the A:shiwi and their land from harm. Their acquisition by European and European–America individuals and institutions broke all A:shiwi religious and cultural protocols. Their dispersion was the result of large-scale historical events that brought non-Western peoples, ideas, and practices to the Americas and led, in a myriad of ways and places, to the wrongful alienation of Native peoples’ religious patrimony.

The A:shiwi began their efforts to recover their Ahayu:da in 1978, twelve years before Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) to provide a process for museums and federal agencies to return to Native Americans and Native Hawaiian organizations certain cultural items—human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony. The A:shiwi were in the vanguard of Native peoples seeking the return of sacred objects from museums, galleries, auction houses, and private collections. Buttressed by the newly legislated American Indian Freedom of Religion Act (1978), intended to protect American Indian religious liberties that had long been infringed upon and even prohibited, the A:shiwi campaign helped make it possible for other tribes to recover their own sacred objects. As T. J. Ferguson, an anthropologist who aided the A:shiwi in their efforts, has written, A:shiwi religious leaders were not only resolute in their pursuit, but most importantly were “morally persuasive” in their conversations with museum curators, administrators, and others in the art world elucidating the importance of returning Ahayu:da to A:shiwi shrines. (See T. J. Ferguson, “Repatriation of Ahayu:da: 20 Years Later.” Museum Anthropology, vol. 33, 2012, pages 194–95.)

During the summer of 1984, I was a curatorial assistant at the Museum of the American Indian–Heye Foundation, the forerunner institution to the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. As such, I was very much aware of the increasingly vocal opposition of Native peoples, including the A:shiwi, to having their sacred objects displayed as “art” in museum exhibitions—in fact, to having them housed in museum collections at all.

It is important to bear in mind that in Western art history, the term “sacred art” is used to refer to (what might be called in this specific context) ancillary objects used in religious ceremonies and buildings, such as Byzantine chalices and other Christian liturgical vessels; or medieval or renaissance paintings bearing religious iconography, such as Hieronymus Bosch’s extraordinary altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi; or, much more recently, certain abstract works with fields of luminous color, such as Henri Matisse’s stained glass windows in the Dominican Chapelle du Rosaire in France. In other words, in Western art history the term is used to refer to artistic creations depicting, expressing, or evoking religious subjects and a realm of reality beyond that ordinarily encountered in daily life. It is used to refer to artistic works intended to speak to the hearts, minds, and spirits of those contemplating the divine.

Importantly, it is not used to refer to, for example, a host consecrated by an ordained priest during the Eucharistic service of a Catholic Mass. A consecrated host has never been considered “art” by museums. Yet objects held by American Indians to be spiritually sentient were. And they were displayed in museums throughout the U.S. and Europe for reasons that had nothing to do with (read: without any understanding of) their deeply held spiritual reality, and without any awareness of, and consequently regard for, the religious practices and tenets of contemporary Native peoples.  

Museum of Modern Art members’ newsletter (no. 32, Jul–Aug, 1984) announcing the upcoming exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern.
 

I learned that the Museum of Modern Art planned to include an A:shiwi Ahayu:da in “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art through a preview in MoMA’s members’ newsletter. I shared this newsletter with the MAI–HF curators, and in particular with Brenda Shears (then Holland), who in turn shared it with our assistant director, George Eager. (Roland Force, director of the MAI–HF, was out of town.) After staff worked their networks to gather salient information, Eager wrote a letter to Richard Oldenburg, director of the Museum of Modern Art and a long-time colleague, advising him that A:shiwi Ahayu:da were “the most sensitive of Native American religious objects” and should not be put on display. He informed Oldenburg that museums throughout the country were in fact removing Ahayu:da from exhibition for this very reason. Eager went on to explain that any Ahayu:da out of A:shiwi  possession were considered stolen objects, illegally removed from shrines on the A:shiwi reservation. In no small measure because of this letter, MoMA removed the Ahayu:da borrowed from the Museum für Völkerkunde from “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art. (See James Clifford, “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern.” In Primitivism and Twentieth Century Art: A Documentary History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, pages 351–68.) 

I have never forgotten the pivotal role that the MAI–HF played in this incident, nor the experience of being a direct witness to a sea change in museum practice. MoMA’s decision represents one of the first times that an eminent institution at the center of one of the cultural capitals of the world removed a sacred American Indian object from display, let alone from such an important (and highly publicized) exhibition. It was, in fact, an historic act that helped focus worldwide attention on the inappropriate display of sacred American Indian objects and on the responsibility of museums to respect Native religious traditions. 

Cécile R. Ganteaume is the curator most recently of Circle of Dance, an exhibition on view at NMAI–New York. She is also the curator of the exhibition An Infinity of Nations: Art and History in the Collections of the National Museum of the American Indian also on view at NMAI–New York, and the editor of the accompanying book. She is a recipient of a 2011 Smithsonian Secretary’s Excellence in Research Award. She joined the staff of the museum when it was established as part of the Smithsonian. Photo by R.A.Whiteside, NMAI. 

Native Sounds Downtown! Saxophonist Sharel Cassity presents bebop and more, Thursday, April 11, at the museum in New York

Sharel Cassity. Photo by Michelle Watt, used with permission.

Saxophonist, composer, and bandleader Sharel Cassity will grace the stage of the National Museum of the American Indian in New York next Thursday, April 11, at 6 p.m.  Her phenomenal band will include Greg Gisbert (trumpet), Cyrus Chestnut (piano), Dezron Douglas (bass), and E. J. Strickland (drums). The concert is free and open to the public; invite friends to attend via the museum's Sharel Cassity event page on Facebook.

In 2010, Sharel and the Tony Lujan Septet performed an extraordinary, standing-room-only concert at the museum in Washington, D.C., in tribute to trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and bassist Oscar Pettiford. Dizzy and OP performed together in 1943 and 1944 at New York’s Onyx Club on 52nd Street, and their fertile collaboration was characterized by Dizzy himself as “the birth of the bebop era.” In bebop, complex, asymmetric melodic lines performed on several instruments bracket improvisational, fast-tempo solos that highlight the superb musicianship of each player. Intentionally pursuing the difficult, beboppers freed the music from the page, inverting chord progressions, altering rhythm and scales, experimenting with changes in structure in a poetic display of musical fluency. 

Sharel Cassity (saxophone), Edsel Gomez (piano), Conrad Herwig (trombone), Tony Lujan (trumpet), and Yunior Terry (bass) performing at the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall. 2010, Washington, D.C. Photo by R.A.Whiteside, NMAI.

Today’s jazz musicians continue to make history and push the music forward. Sharel Cassity is particularly known for her breathtaking improvisations, and ability to hold her own with the greats. She has performed with saxophonist Jimmy Heath and trumpeter Roy Hargrove, and recently toured Europe with the Dizzy Gillespie Afro Cuban Experience.  Sharel has released two albums to critical acclaim, Just for You and Relentless. 

Like Oscar Pettiford, Sharel Cassity grew up in Oklahoma, with a musical father of Cherokee heritage. Both Pettiford and Cassity are inductees in the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame. Up Where We Belong: Native Americans in Popular Music, a current exhibition at the museum in New York, reveals the broad spectrum of Native musicians who have played transformative roles in many American musical genres. Pettiford is featured in the jazz section of the exhibition; Cassity is writing the next chapter in this moment we are so privileged to share with her. 

The concert on April 11 will give the museum's New York audience the opportunity to experience this exciting music firsthand through Pettiford standards, as well as to enjoy new music and new collaborations.

—Margaret Sagan

Margaret Sagan is Visitor Services manager at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York.

Native Sounds Downtown! with Rob Lamothe, Ryan Johnson, Ronnie Johnson, Zander Lamothe, and Rose Lamothe
Thursday, April 11, at 6 p.m.
National Museum of the American Indian in New York

Directions

RSVP & share the event via Facebook 

Native Sounds Downtown! Rob Lamothe & his band pay tribute to American Indian musicians, April 25 at the museum in New York

 

Rob Lamothe and the band, from left to right: Ryan Johnson, Ronnie Johnson, Rob Lamothe, Rose Lamothe, and Zander Lamothe. Photo courtesy of the artists. Used with permission.

Last summer singer, songwriter, and producer Rob Lamothe helped kick off the opening of the exhibition Up Where We Belong: Native Musicians in Popular Culture at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York. He and his band will return to perform at the museum Thursday, April 25, at 6 p.m. Supporting Rob are talented band members bassist Ryan Johnson, guitarist Ronnie Johnson, drummer Zander Lamothe, and vocalist and pianist Rose Lamothe. Together they will take the stage in the Up Where We Belong gallery and pay tribute to the artists featured in the exhibition with a set of iconic songs and some of their own personal favorites. The concert is free and open to the public; invite friends to attend via the museum's Rob Lamothe event page on Facebook. 

For the past 30 years, Rob has enjoyed an award-winning career with songs on the Billboard charts in the U.S. He has shared stages with everyone from Gun 'n' Roses to Ron Sexsmith. His songs are heard on hit TV shows like Melrose Place and the long-running Australian soap opera Paradise Beach. And Rolling Stone Europe has said he's got an "out-of-this-world soulful voice.” 

In the last several years, Rob has devoted much of his musical energy to working with some of North America's pre-eminent Native artists. Rob has recorded with award-winning artist David Maracle (Aboriginal Peoples Choice Awards, Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards, National Aboriginal Achievement Awards, etc). Rob teaches at Interprovincial Music Camp with Juno Award-winner Derek Miller from Six Nations Mohawk territory and internationally renowned guitarist, producer, and American Idol music director Stevie Salas (Apache). Rob's deep commitment to community is reflected in his work with young people from the Nimkee Nupigawagan Healing Centre in Muncey, Ontario, and in his job running the Emergency Housing Program for the province's Haldimand and Norfolk counties.

The band's up-and-coming young bassist Ryan Johnson has opened for musicians Derek Miller, Pappy Johns Band, and others on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border. Inspired by classic rock bands from the ’60s and ’70s, Johnson and his band earned a 2010 Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards nomination.

Guitarist Ronnie Johnson (unrelated to Ryan Johnson) hails from the Six Nations of the Grand River territory, where he grew up hearing blues and rock. By creating music that makes people dance—playing bass, rhythm guitar, and lead guitar with The Blues Brigade and Midnight Lightning for the past five years—Ronnie has “followed in the storied tradition of legendary Six Nations blues musicians.”

Named “Drummer of the Year” at the 2012 Hamilton Music Awards, Zander Lamothe has rocked in numerous Canadian and European tour shows. With his drumming featured behind artists City and Colour, Melissa McClelland, and others, this zealous artist has drummed his way from California to New York.

Beginning her musical career, 16-year-old Rose Lamothe accompanies the band with her singing and piano skills. Rose has been honored to be mentored by musicians such as Bernard Fowler from the Rolling Stones and Donna Grantis from Prince.

The music will kick off at 6 p.m. on the Up Where We Belong gallery stage at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, located at One Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan. This show is guaranteed to be a crowd-pleaser and a real treat for visitors who want to experience a concert inside of a gallery surrounded by the history of Native icons of music.   

—Aimee Beltramini

Aimee Beltramini is an intern in the Public Affairs and Visitor Services Departments at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York. 

Native Sounds Downtown! with Rob Lamothe, Ryan Johnson, Ronnie Johnson, Zander Lamothe, and Rose Lamothe
Thursday, April 25, at 6 p.m.
National Museum of the American Indian in New York

Directions

RSVP & share the event via Facebook 

Circle of Dance: Manikins Bring the Show Alive

Quechua Danza de Tijeras (Scissor Dance) outfit, 2010. Huancavelica, Peru. Cotton and synthetic fabric and trim, metallic fringe and thread, sequins, feathers, dye, plastic jewel. EP0954. Photo by Ernest Amoroso, NMAI

By Cécile R. Ganteaume

On October 6, 2012, a new exhibition opens at the National Museum of the American Indian–New York, to be on view for five years. Through the presentation of ten social and ceremonial dances selected from throughout the Americas, Circle of Dance presents Native dance as a vibrant, diverse, and above all meaningful form of cultural expression. Each of the ten dances is represented through the display of a single manikin dressed in full regalia and posed in a distinctive dance position. The manikins can be seen in the display cases built into the walls of the Diker Pavilion for Native Arts and Culture, a 6,000-square-foot exhibition and performance space designed specifically for dance.

The website accompanying the exhibition features essays by ten writers, each of whom has a deep, often personal, appreciation of the social, cultural, and ritual significance of the dance he or she illuminates. As the essays make clear, all of the dances share fundamental underlying meanings in which people’s close communion with their ancestors and with the natural and spiritual worlds figure prominently. Each of these dances embodies an awareness of a greater cosmic order, and often of the importance of reciprocal relationships in maintaining that order. In other words, life-sustaining concepts are embedded in these dances.

The dances featured range from a Yup´ik Quyana (Thank-You) Song Dance from western Alaska, in which male and female performers use feather or caribou-hair finger fans—said to represent the human spirit itself—to accentuate the fluid movements of their upper bodies and arms; to the Cubeo Óyne dance once performed in the Columbian and Brazilian Amazon by men wearing painted bark-cloth outfits representing animal spirit-beings who enter Cubeo villages to dance among and console grieving relatives; to the Quechua Danza de Tijeras (Scissor Dance), performed at festivals timed in accordance with the Andean Highland agricultural calendar and Catholic feast days, in which male dancers form teams with violinists and harpists to perform spectacular dances involving dynamic gymnastic movements requiring great dexterity and physical ability.

Correspondingly, dance outfits range from a Yup´ik parka made from several furs, including Arctic squirrel, land otter, wolf, and wolverine, and decorated with glass beads; to a knee-length Cubeo bark mask painted to represent forest spirits known as takahédekokü, seen only by Cubeo shamans; to a brightly colored Quechua Scissor Dancer’s baggy trousers and fitted jacket richly decorated with metallic embroidery, gold and silver fringe, and colored sequins and beads.

Absolutely essential to the presentation of each dance in the exhibition is the creation of ten custom-made manikins upon which the culturally rich dance outfits are displayed. From the outset of the exhibition planning, designers Gerry Breen and Susanna Stieff, NMAI–NY deputy director for exhibitions Peter Brill, and I knew full well that the impact of the manikins would be key to the success of the exhibition. Early on much time went into researching commercially available manikins that might be used. The manikins had to meet two essential criteria: They had to be flexible, so that they could be posed at dynamic moments that would capture the essence of the Native dance movement vocabularies in each of the ten dances and reveal how varied the dance styles are. Second and equally important, the manikins had to be made in several sections so that the dance clothing could be placed upon them without causing any stress to the garments. In addition, we hoped the manikins’ faces would achieve the look we were striving for.

NMAI mount-maker Shelly Uhlir was central to this thought process. A veteran and master mount-maker with over 20 years of museum experience, Shelly was the person with the greatest understanding of what would be required of manikins that were to be dressed in elaborate dance regalia—clothing, headdresses, and accessories—from the museum’s collections. In the midst of our evaluations, a visit to the fashion-design exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute excited the designers even more to the idea of displaying a broad range of Native dance clothing so often deeply integral to ritual performances—and to the potential of manikins to help create stunning visual impact.

At first some of the commercial manikins we considered for Circle of Dance appeared to be strong possibilities, because they could be posed dynamically. Over a period of weeks, if not months, however, commercial possibility after possibility was dismissed, for a wide variety of reasons. This period came to an end when Shelly, having demonstrated much patience with the rest of us, announced that if we wanted manikins that could express a range of dance movement vocabularies, could be dressed in clothing from the museum’s collections, and would have the faces we wanted, she would have to make them. Asked exactly how she would do this, she responded that she would figure it out, that she had some ideas and would start doing tests. 

Shelly Uhlir in her mount-making studio at NMAI’s Cultural Resources Center fitting a hand on a manikin she created for Lakota Northern Traditional Dance regalia. Photo by R.A.Whiteside, NMAI 

Prototypes began to appear. The designers were opposed to the manikins’ having a hard fiberglass finish. Shelly suggested making the head and face from a wire frame covered with cloth. The head was modeled with wire mesh to suggest not just a profile, but also the jawline and cheekbones. The technique gave us the sense of definition we wanted without being too detailed, but more experimenting with different materials was needed. Shelly next showed the exhibition team a fabric dog made for a previous exhibition. It had been coated with a gesso-like product to allow for the smooth application paint. We were impressed with the figure’s lifelike qualities. In addition to having a soft fabric finish, the designers knew that they wanted the Circle of Dance manikins to be painted a neutral grey in order not to distract from the clothing; they wanted the manikins to have a strong physical impact not to dominate the clothing, but simply to animate it. And the manikins needed to be able to take paint.

After consulting with some of her colleagues, Shelly proposed using a soft fabric that could molded around the manikin’s core and painted. The pliable fabric—essentially a synthetic felt that, after steaming, can be molded to hold a shape—offers great possibilities in Shelly’s hands. Shelly typically sculpts torsos and limbs for displaying clothing from polyethylene foam, but in earlier exhibitions the foam has always been fully covered. In Circle of Dance, we knew, parts of the dancers’/manikins’ bodies would be visible. And so, each manikin in the exhibition is custom-made by Shelly by first sculpting the torsos, hips, and upper and lower limbs from foam; joining those parts; and then covering exposed areas with fabric that she molds into human form and paints.

Shelly decided that the manikins' hands and feet required special treatment to make them look lifelike. She achieved this by casting the hands of a few conservators and collections staff (who graciously volunteered for the job) and her own feet, and molding the pliable fabric with those lifelike casts. The hands of the manikins are especially important, not only because the gestures of the arms and hands are essential to expressing the upper-body movement of the dances, but because several of the manikins hold things: a Tlingit Raven rattle, a pair of Yup´ik finger fans, a Mandan eagle dance fan, a Lakota beaded dance staff, a scarf, and juniper sprigs. The manikins’ hands have to look good and be functional. Again, Shelly has created a substructure that can securely hold a museum object, then covers the mount with fabric she has shaped over casts to create, for example, a hand lithely flourishing a caribou-hair fan.

Thanks to Shelly’s resourcefulness and technical and creative expertise, Circle of Dance will feature ten unique figures that show male and female dancers, adults and children, performing distinct Native dances. Some figures are posed in spiraling dance movements with shoulders, chests, and hips turning one way and the other. Other manikins have quiet middle bodies and subtly undulating arms. Some crouch. Some step nimbly, while others step with high-speed energy. All seem to move—forward, laterally, or with leaps up into the air. And all have expressive head and hand gestures.

All, I should say, except one. Due to missionary efforts in the 1940s, the Cubeo Óyne dance from the Amazon we are featuring is no longer performed. Because of this, and because of the particular construction and relative fragility of the painted-bark dance outfit, Shelly suggested that we deliberately use not a fully articulated, animated manikin for this figure, but a basic support mount.

Cubeo Óyne dance outfit, 1966. Amazonas State, São Gabriel da Cachoeira Municipality, Rio Uaupes, Brazil. Bark cloth, plant dye. 23/7047. Photo by Ernest Amoroso, NMAI

The Óyne dance mount is a haunting reminder that missionaries and government agents in countries throughout the Americas tried to suppress Native dancing, and actually outlawed it for years, in their efforts to impose assimilation. In striking contrast to this sad fact of history, however, the dynamic manikins Shelly has created for Circle of Dance to express an impressive range of dance styles and movement vocabularies truly help convey that unique forms of social, ceremonial, and ritual dancing maintain a vital place in contemporary Native life in many Native communities. 

Cécile R. Ganteaume is also the curator of the exhibition Infinity of Nations: Art and History in the Collections of the National Museum of the American Indian, on display at NMAI–NY, and the editor of the book of the same title. She is a recipient of a 2011 Secretary of the Smithsonian’s Excellence in Research Award for her work on Infinity of Nations. Photo by R.A.Whiteside, NMAI

Circle of Dance will be on view at NMAI–NY from October 6, 2012, through October 8, 2017.

A Native Son's Tribute to New York

Thomas W. Coffin (Prairie Band Potawatomie). Untitled (Coyote arrives in New York), 1988. Pastel on paper, 40 x 40 cm.

Note: To support the museum, please go to Partners in Preservation and vote for NMAI-NY. Your vote may make the difference in the museum's earning a grant of $200,000 toward construction of a new children's learning center at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York. We appreciate your taking the time to vote every day through May 21. Thank you.


If I can make it here, I’ll make it anywhere!—Centuries before American pop culture immortalized living in New York as the ultimate measure of success, generations of Native people—a few known, most not—were making it here, and we continue to make it here every day. It was Native people, not Broadway talent scouts or Madison Avenue ad men, who first determined that New York was the place to be. With its many waterways and ample natural resources, Mannahata—“the hilly island” in the language of the Delaware—and its environs provided a bountiful home for several Native communities. What is now New York City was a melting pot long before the Dutch, the English, and other immigrants laid claim to it.

New Yorkers readily recognize the Native presence here in the many Native place names around the metropolitan area. Yet it may surprise many to know that New York City has the largest urban population of Native people in the United States. Almost 90,000 New Yorkers claim American Indian or Alaska Native heritage, according to the 2000 census. I am one of them.

I’m also the only native New Yorker in my family and, like any New Yorker, very proud of that fact. My Pueblo father and Spanish mother were born and raised in New Mexico. My two sisters were born in Nebraska and California, respectively. My father was the first Native American dentist in the United States, and his tours of duty in the U.S. Public Health Service took our family to various places around the country. In the summer of 1960, the family moved from Harlem, Montana—on the Fort Belknap Reservation, home of the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine tribes—to Staten Island, where my dad had been assigned to a residency program. I was born less than a year later. This would be our last stop.

My family remembers their arrival in New York. As my father approached the city on the New Jersey Turnpike, he caught his first glimpse of the famous Manhattan skyline. At that moment, he decided not to take the Staten Island exit, but to head straight for that skyline, which he had only seen in movies like Broadway Melody and 42nd Street. With my mother and sisters in tow, he drove our 1958 Chevy over the George Washington Bridge and headed downtown, into the heart of the city, to see Times Square, Macy’s (from Miracle on 34th Street), the Empire State Building (On the Town, An Affair to Remember, King Kong), the Metropolitan Opera House, and other iconic New York sites. As every New Yorker knows, he’d have been better off taking the Lincoln Tunnel, but he wanted to see everything. Heaven only knows how this Pueblo dentist, just in from Montana, navigated his way through Manhattan’s streets and traffic, but he was on a mission. For him, this was New York. Still is. 

After spending a few nights in a Staten Island motel, my parents found an apartment at the northern end of the borough. At night, from the dining-room window of our small apartment, we could see the lights of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge as it was being built. I am certain that these early memories, along with the knowledge that my Grandpa Blue Spruce was an accomplished draftsman and furniture-maker, indirectly influenced me to become an architect.

Duane and his sisters at Lincoln Center, 1964. Photo courtesy of the Blue Spruce family.

My acutely nonurban parents fully embraced the New York experience and encouraged my sisters and me to do the same. They made sure that we appreciated every cultural landmark New York had to offer—the “new” Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Cloisters, Madison Square Garden, Yankee Stadium, Shea Stadium, the Bronx Zoo, Broadway and Times Square, Rockefeller Center and Radio City Music Hall, the American Museum of Natural History, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Coney Island, and the Museum of the American Indian at West 155th Street and Broadway. My parents divorced a few years later, and my father left New York in 1966. My mother, barely thirty and now a single mother, struggled, but she continued her role as her children’s ambassador to New York City. We couldn’t afford a car, so we made all of these excursions by bus, subway, and that floating New York icon, the Staten Island Ferry, which gave our trips an air of adventure.

Unfortunately, my parents’ divorce not only split up our family, it separated my sisters and me from our Pueblo heritage. We never had enough money to visit New Mexico. Our Spanish relatives came to visit, but their visits were rare. Even so, I can still remember my Grandma Martinez, in our cramped kitchen, flipping dough back and forth between her hands as she made us tortillas for breakfast. Aside from the Pueblo artwork around our apartment and stories of New Mexico from my mother, our knowledge of our Native roots was limited. Still, my sisters and I were proud of our heritage, and not just because we had the coolest last name of any of our friends. More than two decades later, I reunited with my father and other Pueblo family members, and they have bridged many of the cultural gaps that had opened over the years.

The opening of the National Museum of the American Indian–New York within the historic Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, 1994. Photo by Krause/Johansen for NMAI.

In 1975, I was accepted into the prestigious Regis High School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. This meant that I had to take the bus, the ferry, and the subway to get to school—an hour and twenty minutes each way, on a good day. At the tender age of fourteen, I became a seasoned New York commuter, complete with a stoic commuter face and my fingertips blackened by New York Times newsprint. One of the more intriguing parts of my daily commute was the short walk from the Whitehall Street ferry terminal to the Bowling Green subway station, when I walked past an amazing, though empty and lifeless, building—the U.S. Custom House, now home to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian–New York. Little did I know then that I would go off to Syracuse University, pursue a career in architecture and museum work in New York, Santa Fe, and Washington, D.C., and, thirty years later, wind up working in that very same Beaux Arts landmark.

Not a bad story for a Pueblo/Spanish kid who grew up on Staten Island, but it’s just one of thousands of stories of Native New Yorkers and our experiences in the city. I hope that these memories give you a sense of one Native American’s feelings for this city and for the National Museum of the American Indian here, a New York cultural institution dedicated to presenting the stories of all the Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere.

—Duane Blue Spruce (Laguna and San Juan Pueblo)
 

Duane Blue Spruce, planning coordinator at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, is currently taking part in the Smithsonian Palmer Leadership Development Program. Photo by Cynthia Frankenburg, NMAI.

 

 

 

This essay is adapted from the foreword to Mother Earth/Father Skyline: A Souvenir Book of Native New York, edited by Duane Blue Spruce and published by the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). The drawing of Coyote arriving in New York is from the NMAI children's book Coyote in Love with a Star, written by Marty Kreipe de Montaño (Prairie Band Potawatomi) and illustrated by Thomas W. Coffin.

 © NMAI, Smithsonian Institution.