Smithsonian celebrates

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Gerald McMaster, a Siksika member who grew up on the Red Pheasant reserve in Saskatchewan, occupies a senior position at the newly opened National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in the United States capital city.

As special assistant to the director for mall exhibitions, McMaster has opened the doors for other Canadian Aboriginal people and communities to be a part of this ambitious American project.

The official Sept. 21 opening of the NMAI was attended by about 80,000 people. Close to 25,000 Indigenous people (including Siksika Chief Strater Crowfoot) from throughout the Americas and beyond, celebrated the opening of the Smithsonian Institute's newest museum with a spectacular procession down the middle of the National Mall in downtown Washington.

The design of the NMAI is unmistakably the work of Alberta Aboriginal architect Douglas Cardinal. He designed the building but parted ways with the museum after a dispute. He refused to attend the opening.

The Canadian Embassy got into the spirit of the opening, screening Canadian Aboriginal films throughout six days of celebrations. An Aboriginal art display compiled by the Canada Council was also available for visitors to tour in the embassy.

McMaster provided visiting Canadian journalists with a guided tour of the museum just prior to the official opening. He explained the significance of the exhibits. The museum is dedicated to being different from traditional museum exhibits that display Indigenous peoples as quaint relics of the past, he said.

"We're not just passive victims of change. We've survived," he said.

McMaster explained how a Saskatchewan boy from an Alberta band came to be doing such an important job in such an influential city.

"It certainly began when I was working at the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College [now First Nations University of Canada] and they were looking for a curator of contemporary art in Ottawa." Before his work with the NMAI, McMaster was the curator-in-charge of the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull, Que. "This was around 1980, 1981. They had a national competition for the position and I was encouraged to reply and I eventually won the position. So I'd been there since 1981 and left in 2000, almost 20 years. I came here in 2000. It was quite by accident I became a curator. My background is as an artist and I always worked with artists; I taught art," he said.

"When you think that Indian people can now become academics and scholars and not only just in a Western sense of academics and scholarship, but we now have to go back into our own cultures and traditions and histories and understand what the basis of those are," he said. "To look at our philosophical roots and underpinnings and try to understand what is our intellectual tradition. Some people say, 'Oh, you have an intellectual tradition?' Well, we do. I think the exhibitions which you'll see are largely based on our intellectual traditions and I hope that's what the public will see. So young Indian people now certainly should be encouraged. There's now a growing number of academics that can really help challenge and question and give the questions to the students to go after. What are the great questions we need to ask? One is, of course, what is a Native intellectual tradition? You have to understand it. Where do you find it? What is it? And who's practicing it? In my work as a curator, those are questions I have to ask as well."

Knowing your own culture is just a start, he added.

"You have to, as an Indian scholar, not only know yourself as a Native person in your culture, but you should get outside of it. Learn about the diversity, the plurality of our cultures that exist out there and to understand them. Because sometimes there are relationships that we all have and sometimes there are tremendous differences. So it is trying to understand what that is all about."