Holiday Highlights

Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!  I feel a little better now that we're caught up with holiday greetings.  It's been an exciting, crazy, and fun holiday season but somehow I'm very glad that things are winding back down...I've had plenty of days of a full stomach, given my liver enough of a workout (I neglect it shamefully sometimes), and eaten my fair share of tasty desserts.

Psyched to go to Narnia again, in our 1940s gear!

Some holiday highlights: None of the four dogs assembled at home got into the turkey neck, mashed potatoes, or cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving.  They (or rather their dander) did prove a formidable enemy to Paul's sinuses on Christmas, though.  Maybe I should buy stock in benadryl...  I had a fun weekend in Williamsburg to celebrate Gaudete Mass (third week of Advent, Gaudete means "rejoice") and finally got to see Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Narnia #5 or #3, depending on how you're counting.  I spent about a week in New Jersey with Paul's family - the first few days were intentional, and the rest were the result of the crazy post-Christmas blizzard that dropped over two feet of snow in the area.  All the same, the Masurs proved lovely company, especially due to their tolerance of my love of "boring" historical films.  I actually made it to a few daily Masses, and Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve was beautiful (I don't care what you said about the music, family, it was awesome).  And for the big news, my brother Chris and his girlfriend Katie got engaged on Christmas Eve - congratulations!

I headed back to work this week - not as an intern, but a contractor in the Repatriation Department of the NMAI.  I'm very excited to be spending the next four months in the office.  Especially since I've discovered the bountiful Smithsonian library system.

Twenty Years

Please forgive my long hiatus.  It has been a busy month, between state-hopping, holidays, job-searching and grad school applications.  I'm currently enjoying a relaxing stay with Paul's family in New Jersey.  My Christmas shopping is done (well, almost), my gifts are wrapped, and I'm getting a good rest before the baking-and-wrapping extravaganza that will be Wednesday and Thursday.  Come mid-January I will be starting a post-graduate certificate in Geographic Information Systems (yay!).  In the coming weeks and months I hope to have official news about jobs and graduate school.

In a previous post, I outlined the basics of repatriation and legislation under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) Act.  In honor of the 20th anniversary of NAGPRA, George Washington University held a symposium in mid-November.  Those two days were an illuminating experience, revealing the deep hurt difficult conflicts that are an inevitable part of the repatriation process.  Scientists, curators, and Native Americans spoke of their divergent experiences and perspectives.  It was a very moving experience - an chance to see human faces rather than the simply sherds and bones and dirt of archaeology.

The difficult: The sorrow of Native people whose continued efforts have been unsuccessful.  The hurt that has a place, even in successful repatriations.  The yet unresolved disagreements between scientists and Native people.  The inspiring: Beginning and ending each day with prayer.  Inspiring stories.  Academics and curators with the courage to admit wrong practices.  The opportunity to learn from the experience of so many others.

I continue to be glad that I decided to take time off before grad school.  I am learning so much from these unique opportunities, things I most certainly would have missed had I decided to push on through.  As I anticipate returning to the hotbed of academic theory and thought, I do not want to forget the human faces - the the human experience that unites us all, regardless of time period, culture, or language.

National Museum of the American Indian

Days at the Museum

It's hard to believe - I'm already halfway through my internship at the Smithsonian.  It's been a fun five weeks so far, full of museums and behind-the-scenes collections tours...and, you know, work.

Posing with Kari and Carrie

A couple weeks ago, I was walking with a few of my coworkers over to the Museum Support Center (MSC), and we caught sight of the above vehicle.  I guess it was some kind of advertising ploy (I forget the website the was written on the back) - but this van was pimped out with all kinds of halloween/graveyard-style stuff.  I believe it was called the "Vanadu."

Enjoying preserved organics!

In a previous post, I regaled you with the story of our tour of the NMAI's collections.  That day we primarily went through the ethnographic collections, which contains items acquired from people (not excavated) over the past hundred years or so.  Since then, I've also had the opportunity to look around the archaeological collections, which includes artifacts that are thousands of years old.  We looked through collections from a dry cave in Arkansas, which mean preserved organic material - baskets, bags, bones, seeds, wood - all still intact after thousands of years in the ground.  It's pretty darn awesome.

With old exhibit props

Finally, I had the much-awaited tour of Natural History's Museum Support Center - also known as "where they keep the Ark".  I must say, they have some pretty cool stuff from all over the world.  Chinese opium pipes.  A million-year-old (and proto-human made) hand axe.  One of the Easter Island heads.  Mesoamerican sculpture.  Parkas made from seal gut.  Old exhibit props.  Both of the collections buildings in Suitland (NMAI and NMNH) were built during the 1990s, and are truly state-of-the-art facilities.  I'm glad that the Smithsonian is taking good care of the world's treasures.

I didn't find the Ark.  Maybe I should keep a look out for secretive-looking black cars pulling through the wrought iron gates...

Natural History's Museum Support Center

The Streets of Manhattan

Keep your splendid, silent sun; Keep your woods, O Nature, and the quiet places by the woods; Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn-fields and orchards; Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields, where the Ninth-month bees hum; Give me faces and streets! give me these phantoms incessant and endless along the trottoirs! Give me interminable eyes! give me women! give me comrades and lovers by the thousand! Let me see new ones every day! let me hold new ones by the hand every day Give me such shows! give me the streets of Manhattan! -"Give me the Splendid, Silent Sun," Walt Whitman

This past Friday we took an intern field trip (yes, intern field trips again!) to New York City.  As part of the internship at the National Museum of the American Indian, we visited the original museum - the George Gustav Heye Center - in New York.  Housed in the old marble-columned commerce building, it has a very different atmosphere from the Mall museum.  Yet its exhibits are wonderful - everything from beaded tunics and moccasins to Maya epigraphy and Aztec obsidian "mirrors," to Peruvian gold emblems.  I love how the NMAI unites native heritage throughout the Americas.

I also had some time to explore the American Museum of Natural History before flying back to D.C.  It's a bit of a shock to go from Native American museums to Natural History museums.  I suppose I've been spoiled by the NMAI and its devotion to consultation with native groups in curating exhibits.  The museum-goer is presented with a different perspective when exhibits are imbued with traditional, as well as anthropological, understandings of the objects displayed.

NMAI interns in NYC

It was interesting to be back in New York City again.  So much noise, movement, and diversity.  But I must say, I don't quite agree with Whitman.  I would choose the quiet serenity of the country any day over the bustle of city life.  It is beautiful, in its own way, but not so peaceful.

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.