Indiana Jones and the Mystery of Storage Space

Do you remember the last scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark?  You know, post wrath-of-God and Nazi face-melting, pre-final kiss with the lovely Miss Ravenwood?  We see the ark, packed into a wooden crate, and loaded into a storeroom the size of a football field - which we must assume to be filled with similar such sacred treasures from faraway lands.  That place exists - in the Smithsonian museum support center in Maryland.

As a brief introduction to my current stage of post-graduation adventures (which have led me to such an Indiana Jones-esque discovery): I am interning at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), a very recent addition to the Smithsonian.  I work at the Cultural Resource Center (CRC) in Maryland, sorting through papers and computer files relating to repatriation.  Repatriation is, in the most basic sense, the return of Native American (and Native Hawaiian and Alaskan) human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony, to tribes.  With the passage of the NMAI Act in 1989 and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, museums, as well as federal and academic institutions are required to work with federally recognized tribes in order to return objects in the above categories.  I'll go into more detail in a future entry.

Today the interns (most of whom work at the museum in DC proper) visited the CRC for a tour of collections and various labs.  The CRC is a pretty recent building - it was opened in 1999 - and it is built to house collections in a respectful, considerate way.  To many native peoples, objects are alive, so it is important for them to be stored in an appropriate environment.  When I walked into the room, my jaw quite literally dropped at the kind of items before my eyes.  Totem poles, some more than fifty feet high.  Canoes.  Sculptures.  And as we explored the collections further; buffalo robes from the plains, feathered baskets from California, and kachinas from the southwest.  I felt alive among all these beautiful and powerful objects.  They are alive.

I hear that the Natural History Museum's collections (just a stone's throw away at the aforementioned museum support center) are extraordinary.  A very different environment from the NMAI CRC, with objects from all over the world.  We're scheduled to go on a tour in a few weeks - I'll let you know if I see the ark.