American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The National Museum of the American Indian shall recognize and affirm to Native communities and the non-Native public the historical and contemporary culture and cultural achievements of the Natives of the Western Hemisphere. NMAI Mission Statement This essay interrogates the politics of representation, expectation, and responsibility at the new National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington, DC. We explore the interpretive contests (between and among Natives and non-Natives) provoked by the museum’s representational strategies. Flushing out some of these complexities, we point to the culturally contingent bases of visitors’ disappointments, confusions, and pleasures. We suggest that the NMAI pushes visitors to take responsibility for the familiarity and ignorance (and often these are part of the same interpretive package) that they bring through the doors of the NMAI. The power-laden politics of recognition, identity, and narration—as played out in the cross-cultural and intracultural exchanges at work in the museum—are shown to be fundamental to any interpretive possibility. As Indians who are also academics, our own—sometimes tumultuous— reactions to these productive difficulties structure the analysis.