Indians mark "historic moment"

By Sara Jean Green
Seattle Times staff reporter

CHUCK KENNEDY / KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS In the Native Nations Procession, 25,000 people from more than 500 tribes walked from the Smithsonian Castle to the new National Museum of the American Indian.

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Before any speeches were made, 25,000 people from more than 500 tribes, including two dozen tribes from Washington state, participated in the Native Nations Procession, a five-block walk from the Smithsonian Castle, the first building built on the Mall, to the museum, built on the Mall's last piece of available land.

Seventeen years in the making, the $220 million, 400,000-square-foot museum is the first in the country dedicated exclusively to Native Americans — and the first to allow Native Americans to tell their stories in their own way. Indians were involved in every stage of the museum's development, from conception to construction, and comprise 75 percent of the museum's staff.

"This is a historic moment. It is the single-most-important achievement for Native people this century," Linley Logan said as the procession streamed past him. He's a Seneca from upstate New York who worked for the museum in the early '90s before moving to Seattle with his Tlingit wife and four children; he's also a board member of the Seattle-based United Indians of All Tribes Foundation.

"This is an insider's perspective on Native values and Native culture," he said of the new museum.

Presenting that perspective — and gaining acknowledgement for the multitude of contributions Indians have made, from food domestication to military service — is long overdue, said Bob Charlo, a member of the tiny Kalispel tribe from north of Spokane. Charlo traveled to Washington, D.C., with a group of Muckleshoots for both the museum opening and a dedication ceremony two days earlier at the Pentagon. The ceremony was to bless one of three totem poles carved by members of the Lummi Nation to honor those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"For me, it's been a real spiritual journey, a kind of quest or pilgrimage," said Charlo, who lives in Auburn. "There's a lot of blank pages in the history books that should be filled with our history ... [but] we're getting past that 'invisible people' stage."

If anything, yesterday's procession and dedication, covered by more than 400 journalists from across the Americas, was meant to show that Native peoples and their cultures are very much alive.

With 8,000 more participants than expected, the colorful and dramatic Native Nations Procession alone spanned over three hours. From Native Alaskans, with their red-and-black wool blankets wrapped around their shoulders, to Aztec Indians, who wore elaborate, plumed headdresses, the procession provided a visible reminder of the vast diversity of the first peoples of North, South and Central America.

Some tribal members sang songs and played hand drums as they walked; others waved to spectators lined up six deep along the parade route, shouting greetings to familiar faces.

Sage sweetened the air, and the sounds of flutes and pipes drifted across the Mall.

Two prominent Indian U.S. senators, Dan Inouye, D-Hawaii, and Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., walked at the head of the procession with Alejandro Toledo, a Quechua Indian and president of Peru.

Film director and activist Robert Redford and Seattle architect Johnpaul Jones, who was integral to the museum's design and construction, were among the estimated 80,000 people who attended the opening ceremony.

After the procession, a handful of dignitaries addressed the crowd from a stage that would later be graced by singer Buffy Sainte-Marie and the band Indigenous, as part of the weeklong, music-and-arts First Americans Festival.

As the first drum beat sounded to indicate the start of the museum dedication, a woman dressed in fringed leather slid her fingers across her forearm and whispered to a friend, "I just got goose bumps."

W. Richard "Rick" West, director of the museum, said the site, "located in the shadow of the national Capitol itself," would be "a spiritual marker in recognition of the first citizens of the Americas."

"Once in a great while, something so important and so powerful happens that history seems to stand still in honor," said West, who wore white buckskin and a chief's headdress. "We have felt the cruel and destructive edge of colonialism, but in our minds and in our histories, we are not its victims."

The museum, he said, is to be a symbol of hope, representing the potential for "a new, mutual understanding and respect" that can make "possible true cultural reconciliation."

Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lawrence Small predicted that the newest museum in the institution's 158-year history would draw so much attention it would become "a gateway of discovery to all other Smithsonian museums on this Mall."

"It will be yours for generations and generations to come — and that is a promise we will keep," Small said.

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

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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