Architect helped create a place for Indians to share their stories

By Sara Jean Green
Seattle Times staff reporter

ALAN BERNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES Architect Johnpaul Jones was the lead design consultant on the National Museum of the American Indian, which opens today in Washington, D.C. The tubes behind him contain plans for other projects done by his Pioneer Square firm, Jones & Jones.

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The elder's words were echoed in every Native community Jones and a team of architects and designers visited over two years, soliciting input for a new museum to be built on the last available land on the National Mall.

This morning, Jones and his family will walk with the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma in a procession of more than 400 Indian nations across the Mall to mark the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

For Indian people, the museum is a celebration of the Americas' diverse tribes, their cultures and traditions, and represents an acknowledgement of the vast contributions they've made to American history and society — contributions they say have long been overlooked.

"It's been 12 years of work. It's a culmination. I'm glad it's over with," laughed Jones as he greeted visitors in his firm's historic Pioneer Square office two weeks ago.

"Every Indian community is interested in having some of their culture represented," said Jones, one of four Indian consultants hired to lead the project.

Facts about the National Museum of the American Indian Some 8,000 objects from the museum's permanent collection will be displayed during the opening of the five-story museum. Approximately 4 million people are expected to visit the museum each year. Seventy-five percent of the museum's 4.25-acre site is covered with 150 different indigenous plant species. The museum was built with Kosota rock, a natural, cream-colored stone from southeastern Minnesota. The site's cardinal directions are marked by stones brought from Hawaii, northern Canada, Maryland and Chile's Tierra del Fuego region. Four "grandfather stones" from Alma, Quebec, each weighing 13 to 28 tons, greet visitors at the museum's entrance. Half of the rainwater that falls on the museum will be diverted to an on-site wetland for filtering before being returned to the Potomac River. Upon entering the museum, visitors are greeted by the "Welcome Wall," inscribed with words from more than 200 Native languages. The museum boasts a cafe, with a menu devoted to Native foods and culinary traditions; two multi-media theaters and two museum stores. There are three permanent exhibits on the museum's third and fourth floors: "Our Universe: Traditional Knowledge Shapes Our World"; "Our Peoples: Giving Voice to Our Histories"; and "Our Lives: Contemporary Life and Identities." During the museum's first year, artwork by two prominent 20th-century Native American artists will be on display in an exhibit entitled, "Native Modernism: The Art of George Morrison and Allan Houser." Sources: Native Peoples Arts & Lifeways, Sept/Oct 2004; National Museum of the American Indian Magazine, Fall 2004; Smithsonian magazine, September 2004; The Associated Press — Sara Jean Green

Jones doesn't just build buildings. He creates environments following holistic instincts, so his designs encompass both the practical and the spiritual.

One of maybe 100 American Indian architects in the country, Jones helped lead a movement to diversify Seattle's architectural and design community in the mid-1980s. He was named a fellow to the American Institute of Architects, an honor held by less than 3 percent of his peers, and is working on projects for tribes in Washington, Oregon, Utah and Colorado.

But for now, the attention swirling around Jones, 63, is over the new museum he calls "The Rock." The museum "doesn't have a straight line in it" and is meant to look as though wind and water carved its curves.

"It's not based on an architectural style or a Native heritage," Jones said. "It centers around something very organic, that which is common to Indian communities around the nation.

"It centers around the four worlds: the natural world, the animal world, the human world and the spirit world," he continued. "Within each one of those worlds is something that helped us in the design of this building, the site [and] the interiors."

The fact that Indian people have been involved in every aspect of the museum's creation and will comprise 75 percent of the museum staff is what makes the National Museum of the American Indian so special, Jones said.

Half of the money for the $220 million, 400,000-square-foot museum on 4.25 acres at the foot of the U.S. Capitol came from the federal government. The other half was donated — and "half of that half came from Indian people," Jones said.

"Indian people don't like museums because they are dead places," Jones said. Mainstream museums often represent American Indians as relics of some distant past and display bones and artifacts commonly acquired through theft and the looting of graves.

"This is to be a living place," Jones said of the new museum. The donations demonstrate just how strongly Indian people feel about the need to have a place among the Mall's monuments and museums, where they can finally tell their stories in their own way.

A role model

A tall, handsome man with thick gray hair that's transitioning to white, Jones was born to a Choctaw and Cherokee mother and Welsh father in central Oklahoma in July 1941. He was a teenager when his parents split up and his mother moved Jones and his five sisters to California. After graduating from high school there, Jones studied architecture at the University of Oregon.

Like so many other Indian kids of his generation, Jones was told by white teachers, " 'Oh, you're dyslexic — but you can draw.' So, they put me in a lot of drawing classes," Jones said of the impetus that led him to his profession.

While still earning his degree, Jones worked part-time for his university's art museum. He came to Seattle for the first time in the mid-1960s to pick up some paintings.

Timeline 1896: Electrical engineer George Gustav Heye acquired a Navajo deerskin shirt, the first of 800,000 objects he collected from tribes across the Americas over 45 years. 1916: Heye founded the Museum of the American Indian/Heye Foundation in New York City; the museum opened to the public in 1922. 1989: After years of negotiations, Heye's collection was transferred to the Smithsonian Institution, and Congress enacted legislation creating the National Museum of the American Indian. 1990: W. Richard West (Southern Cheyenne) was appointed as the museum's director. The next year, West launched two years worth of meetings with Indians throughout North and South America. 1994: The first of three buildings comprising the National Museum, the George Gustav Heye Center, opened as a satellite exhibition facility in New York City. 1999: The National Museum's Cultural Resource Center — the main storage facility for the bulk of the museum's 4 million-object collection — opened in Suitland, Md. Seattle architect Johnpaul Jones was involved in the design and construction of the center and research facility. 2004: The $220 million, 400,000-square-foot National Museum of the American Indian opens, built on the last available land on the National Mall. Sources: Native Peoples Arts & Lifeways, September/October 2004; National Museum of the American Indian Magazine, Fall 2004; Smithsonian magazine, September 2004 — Sara Jean Green

"There are certain places in the country with indigenous power," said Jones, who felt that power here and moved to Bainbridge Island in 1967.

The next year, he became a principal in Jones & Jones, a firm that had been founded a few years earlier by Grant and Ilze Jones (no relation to Johnpaul Jones). The San Diego Zoo is probably their best-known work; the zoo, along with Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo, put Jones & Jones at the vanguard of a 1970s movement to create natural, cageless environments for zoo animals.

Jones, a husband, father and grandfather, emanates a calm strength. He is prone to laughter and moments of thoughtful silence. His body leans slightly to the right, supported by a black cane he refers to as "this ugly thing."

Throughout his career, Jones has mentored other American Indian architects. "There's now maybe eight Indian architects in Seattle, most of them women," he said, with a flash of fatherly pride.

"He reminds me of Atlas, with his stature and his presence," said Marga Rose Hancock, executive vice president of the Seattle chapter of the American Institute of Architects. "He's just so solidly connected and gives strength to everything he's involved with — the buildings and the people."

At a time when minority architects "were as scarce as hen's teeth" and "the accepted convention about architecture was that it was a white, gentleman's profession," Jones co-founded a diversity roundtable to create opportunities for people of color in Seattle's design community, Rose Hancock said. Jones has been visible as a spokesman for an expanded view of the profession, one that recognizes "there are different kinds of architecture," she said.

Donald King, a prominent African-American architect, said Jones is "a humanist" uniquely sensitive to people's cultural backgrounds, so he's able to "create environments that are not only pleasing but gentle to the spirit."

"Most architects are more concerned with their own egos and building monuments to their egos," said King, 55, of the Seattle firm DKA. Jones, by contrast, designs buildings that "celebrate the dignity of the users."

"It's something we should all strive for. He's definitely a role model for me," King said.

"Let us tell you a story"

Midway through the project, one of the lead consultants, an Indian architect from Canada who formed the conceptual design of the museum building, dropped out. At that point, work on the project stopped. Jones, an original design-team member who drew the first site design plan, was asked to lead the restart of the project.

Jones reassembled a team of designers and architects, rolling the project back to its design-development phase. Jones ultimately became the project's overall lead design consultant; Jones & Jones, with three other firms, became the museum's architects and landscape architects.

	CHUCK KENNEDY / KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS The museum "doesn't have a straight line in it," architect Johnpaul Jones says of the place he calls "The Rock." It is meant to look as though wind and water carved its curves.

Before the first earth was turned, 10 elders were brought to the site. They prayed and talked among themselves. They found the land's center and buried something there.

"To this day, I don't know what," Jones said. "They had reasons I don't comprehend yet."

He shook his head, marveling at the elders' precision. Without taking measurements or knowing anything about setbacks and building restrictions, they chose a spot allowing maximum use of the land; the spot also marks the intersection of the site's north-south and east-west access lines, Jones said.

"It's the magic of indigenous people that can contribute wonderful things," he said softly.

The spot the elders chose now sits below the center of the circular floor in the Potomac, the grand, domed "welcoming area" off the museum's east entrance. A skylight at the top of the dome and eight prisms embedded in the south wall are positioned to mark three of the sun's four seasonal transits.

	J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE / AP Potomac, the museum's welcoming area, features a skylight reminiscent of smoke holes in traditional dwellings. The room was designed with prisms to highlight seasonal movements of the sun, including today's autumnal equinox.

The prisms will cast rainbows and the skylight will illuminate markings on the Potomac floor during the summer solstice and the spring and fall equinoxes, Jones said. (In winter, the sun's angle is too low.)

"September 21 is the fall equinox, and that's why the museum is opening that day, that's why I got married on that day," Jones said. "That's when change starts taking place."

But even as seasons change, "the land holds onto memory," Jones said. To learn the memory of the museum site, the design team dug up old maps and discovered there was once a creek and wetland there. To honor the creek, a fountain and channel were built and now empty into a wetland that's already attracting ducks and other wildlife, Jones said. The wetland, "a narrow, hardwood forest," and a meadow area are planted with indigenous species such as wild rice, gourds and ancient corn.

Inside, there are three permanent galleries and a contemporary art gallery, Jones said. There are two multi-media theaters and a restaurant serving traditional Native food. There are places for storytelling, dancing and contemplating and places to leave offerings.

From the adzed-cedar wall finishings to the gift-store countertops inlaid with wampum shells, the design elements are all deliberate nods to the different cultures the museum seeks to represent, Jones said.

He hopes "something in this museum offers [visitors] an opportunity to talk," for Indian parents to share stories with their kids, and for Indian people to share their knowledge and beliefs with others.

When non-Indian people come to the museum, Indian people can say, "Now that you're here, let us tell you a story," Jones said. "It's an ancient story from people who've been here a long, long time."

Sara Jean Green: 206-515-5654 or sgreen@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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