2008 Woodie Awards
American Indian Museum Opens in D.C.
Tom Webb ; Knight Ridder Newspapers
Issue date: 2/2/05 Section: News
- Page 1 of 2 next >
|
More than 20,000 Indians led an opening procession to the museum on Washington's grassy Mall. There were Cheyenne chiefs in eagle-feather headdresses, Hopis wrapped in black-and-red weavings, Ojibwe men chanting to ceremonial drums, Seminole women in colorful dresses, and hundreds more proud and emotional tribes, all gathered under a bright blue sky.
"I just cried from the excitement and from being all together," said Norma Mena, a Cherokee from San Antonio. "When the procession started, that's when the tears came."
Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., a chief in the Northern Cheyenne tribe, noted that Washington already has hundreds of monuments and statutes, but until now, none were dedicated to the American people who came first.
"This magnificent structure, which we're going to open today, is that monument," Campbell told the cheering audience. "And in it, we will tell our story."
The $220 million National Museum of the American Indian, with a distinctive curved limestone exterior, sits directly on the National Mall, between the U.S. Capitol and the National Air and Space Museum. It's the 18th museum in the Smithsonian complex.
The American Indian museum is intended to fill a void in the broader understanding of Indian culture, but it also carries emotional power for native people, whose searing history includes centuries of extermination, relocation, disease and neglect. Once numbering perhaps 50 million across North and South America, Campbell said, the Indian population plunged to near-oblivion a century ago.
But now, with 4.3 million American Indians living in the United States alone, Campbell said he was reminded of an old Hopi prophecy that foretold a rebirth and revival.
"That re-emergence of the native people has come true," he said.