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Native Cultures of the Americas Gallery: National Museum of Natural History
The National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) has exhibits spanning a variety of topics including animals, plants, ecosystems, fossils, earth sciences and human diversity. The Native Cultures of the Americas Gallery (NCAG) is one of five exhibitory spaces within the museum devoted to cultures from around the world and offers visitors a condensed walking tour of the distinct cultural areas of North America, encapsulated through select and supposedly representative objects (Rubin 2015). In this section I focus on three displays within the gallery that remove Native American experiences from time and history and as a consequence depict Native American cultures as ahistorical …show more content…
Richard King (1998, 27) noted that visitors interpret the mural as saying something significant about a “formulaic other” as spectator, often being heard saying, “Look at them, they’re totally naked”, “Look at the Indian families” or “Look at the papuses. They called babies papuses”. Visitors’ fixation upon the body, nudity, family structures, and babies demonstrates the reality of the tourist gaze. The tourist gaze is explained by sociologist John Urry as the set of expectations that tourists/audiences place on ‘other’ populations when they engage in observations and attempt to have an ‘authentic’ experience (Urry 1990: 4). The role of the tourist gaze helps visitors to overlook the specific societies and histories juxtaposed within the painting, while reinforcing the predominance of race and timelessness within their stereotypical preconceptions of the indigenous people of North America. The collage like nature of the mural erases the uniqueness and value of these show cased moments in Native American history. As a result, the mural collapses and dehistoricizes the particular pasts of the native nations of North America into a uniform, ethnographic …show more content…
Although these modes of historical production would seem to counter the prevailing presentations of Native Americans within the NMNH, they, in fact, reinforce antihistorical effects as well as interpret significant past events in terms of modern White values and concepts of what it means to be a Native American. The effect of these sub-contexts are seen in the displays of cultural encounters in the NCAG including the diorama depicting John Smith’s, the English soldier and explorer who helped establish the Virginia Colony based at Jamestown, first meeting with the Powhatan Indians and twelve prints by John White, an English artist and mapmaker, depicting Sir Walter Raleigh’s, the knighted explorer’s, exploitation of coastal North Carolina in 1585 (King 1998:

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