National Museum of the American Indian
From Every Tribe and Tongue?
Across the street from the U.S. Capitol, stone ripples, ebbs and waves in and out. There are furrows of soil planted with corn that surround the building during the summer months. A steadily flowing waterfall cascades out of the building down to the boulders below. Over the entrance plaza, the top of the building reaches dozens of yards out into unsupported space. It hangs there like a bird in mid-flight.
It was in this building that I met my supervisor Dan Davis, a White Mountain Apache. He had long and straight black hair that fell far down on his back. “Would you like to start at the front desk?”
Dan was in charge of the volunteers.
“I think I’d rather work in the back in the library,” I said. “Maybe I can research on the side when things are slow.”
As I made my way back to the library, Dan introduced me to another employee.
“You’re new,” she said. “What’s your tribe?”
“Angles, Saxons, Celts, Caledonii, Lombards.” I said.
“So, you’re white?”
“Yeah.”
On the fourth floor of the National Museum of the American Indian, there was a plush donor lounge filled with freshly purchased airport lounge furniture. Often the only presence there was a painting of Rick West in a suit looking like an inside-the-beltway politician. (When I was working at NMAI, the highly publicized ouster of Rick West for lavish spending habits was still in the future. At that point, it was just the gossip at the water cooler.) His office, along with all the rest of the offices, was on the inaccessible fifth floor. The labyrinthine politics of the mysterious fifth floor extended into the marbled halls of Congress and beyond.
That day, the donor room was busy because a film crew shifted all the chairs into a corner to create an ad hoc film set. An assembly of tribal representatives was present to create a traveling exhibit about who and what they are. We draped a curtain as a backdrop to interview each participant in the meeting of the tribes. In a relatively short time, the key light and the kicker light were set up, and the digital cameras were hooked up to external monitors.
We filmed the many stories of the several Native Americans, but none of us had the presence of mind to turn the camera around to film Dan Davis. He never commanded the spotlight. He was content to work quietly.
Dan had lived in Washington D.C. from the time the museum opened (the Autumnal Equinox, 2004) to the time I arrived a year later. He moved from his home in the snowy mountains of Arizona where he was an executive assistant in the Hon-Dah casino. The transition was difficult from the life on the reservation to renting a basement room in Eastern Market in a large town where he knew no one. He saw so many homeless on the way to work and wanted to bring them extra blankets as he would have on the reservation, but he didn’t know if things worked like that here.
When Sitting Bull was on tour with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show more than 120 years ago, he never knew exactly how to spend his salary. A Lakota chief habitually offered any of his belongings to anyone in the tribe who needed assistance. That was simply how a chief showed both his power and his benevolence. Any chief who regularly took what he did not need would not remain chief for long. So Sitting Bull had a habit of going out into the streets and offering money to the first down-and-out person he found. Dan Davis had the same habit.
Despite being born in New Mexico, Dan was orphaned when he was quite young and adopted a by a big family in Kansas. Once for lunch break, Dan asked me if I wanted to go to the nearby McDonald’s on the corner of 4th and C streets. He loved McDonald’s fries. Along the way, I told Dan about my fiancée and my family. Dan told me of the troubles he has had in the wake of his adopted brother’s recent suicide. Dan was heartbroken to be so far away when it happened.
Back in the resource center on the third floor a Catawba intern, with a thick South Carolina accent, read the Tlingit story of “How Raven Stole the Sun” to a group of school children sitting on a buffalo skin. Everyone just called him Catawba, so much so that i’ve forgotten his real name. The children listened in rapt attention until one mother of the children interrupted. “I think it was so horrible what white people did to you. You all lived like really peacefully and they all came and killed you.”
“Umm.” Catawba paused. “Well–”
“Do you all still live in teepees? And how do you all eat Buffalo if they are all gone? And how do you all like live at peace with the earth and all that stuff?”
Catawba smiled politely as he mustered a polite explanation of the current situation of the over 500 federally recognized tribes in the United States today. The kids ran their fingers through the Buffalo robe and sighed–all of them bored now that the story was interrtupted. Catawba had nearly finished explaining to the mother why American Indians live in houses now and not teepees, when one of the kids rolled her eyes and stood up to tug a book out of the children’s library shelf. She leafed through it contentedly, just looking at the pictures. The staff librarian glanced over until he was satisfied that the little girl was taking proper care of the book.
On St. Patrick’s Day, Dan, who had not attended mass for a while, asked if I would attend a stations of the cross ceremony at a small church near Eastern Market. On the walk over he explained that he loves the Virgin of Guadalupe because Juan Diego was native and it demonstrated how Christianity could belong to American Indians as well as any European. He also carefully observed all of the Apache rituals he had relearned on his reservation. Dan saw no problem in doing both. He wanted to cover all his bases, just in case.
Dan then brought up his search for his biological father throughout his reservation. When he finally did find his biological father it answered many questions for him but left more unanswered. When his father regularly asked him for money, he eventually regretted his curiosity. Still he was considering changing his name back to his birth name of Gabriel. He had not changed it yet only because he was so used to being known as Dan. He didn’t know what it would be like to live under a different name.
Back in the donor lounge, the film crew recorded the first interview. The first to be interviewed were two Tohono O’odham men. They discussed the border issues that impacted their reservations on the edge of Arizona and Mexico. After a brief interview, they stood up while still attached to the microphone cord and our film crew had to rush in to untangle them.
Next a Rosebud Sioux from North Dakota described how her county is among the two poorest in the nation. She said people there take it for granted that life is just like that. She talked of the legal battle for the Black Hills in South Dakota. She also talked of trying to find some common ground with the other tribes assembling the traveling exhibit. As a Sioux she knows her own history but not much of these other tribes. She explained it this way: “You wouldn’t really expect someone from France to know all the history of Greece, would you? We’re different tribes, different nations. Only white people think we’re all the same.”
It makes sense. Just as I was constantly irked by the native habit to refer to the generic “whites”, they also don’t love being lumped together into one homogenous whole. After all, everyone knows the difference between Spain and England or Germany and Italy, yet they expect Sioux and Iroquios, or Hopi and Cherokee to be fundamentally interchangeable. They’re not.
That’s why a lot of native people do not even use the term “native American” and some even prefer the old term “Indian” over it. What they want to be known by is their tribe, not a continent wide generic term. That’s only something that academics and “white” people constantly obsess over to show their proper cultural decorum. It’s been said that indiscriminately hating all of a group and indiscriminately loving all of a group are really just two sides of the same generalizing coin. (Though of course to be indiscriminately loved is still preferable to being indiscriminately hated.) Shockingly, (or not so shockingly) I learned that what folks from most tribes want is just what the rest of us want: enough money to make to do, and enough space to do it in. I learned to share the wry amusement that out of town natives felt toward most of the ridiculous guilt gymnastics of most of academia and affluent Americans and all their “land acknowledgements” and their panic over terms.
The Rosebud Sioux woman continued,” “When I drive out from Seattle toward home I know I’m getting close to the rez when all the radio stations turn to static and there is only sky for miles and miles,” she said. “This city horizon is odd for me. I don’t like it.”
A thin guy with wiry, black hair, olive skin, glasses and a denim jacket walked in next. He is Ojibwa and he spoke with energy, enthusiasm and a strong Canadian accent. He talked about border issues that arose after his tribe found their lands straddling Canada and the United States. He listed off dozens of points that flowed right off the top of his head about what he has learned from this exhibit that he can share with his own tribe’s museum.
“But, it’s good to have a focal point finally. This museum represents a center where we can reorganize and present ourselves as we want to be presented,” he said.
Again, almost all of our interview subjects asked not to be referred as Native American, First Nations or American Indian. They either rolled their eyes or gave a smirk when asked. As a rule, most native folks prefer to be known by their tribe, but as any native will tell you: if you’ve met one native and asked their opinion… then you’ve just heard one person’s opinion, that’s all.
On the second anniversary of his brother’s death, Dan invited me to his basement apartment. He said it is a custom among White Mountain Apache to mourn for two years and then break their mourning with a gathering honoring the deceased. He invited me, and a half dozen other native friends. There was a great deal of food, most of it prepared by Dan, but each of the guests brought something. I brought a bag of chips but I arrived early so I helped chop the strawberries for Dan’s fruit salad. His tastes in food were a mixture of native foods from his reservation and the Midwestern food that he grew up with. When everyone arrived, Dan asked if anyone would mind if we prayed the rosary. After a short silence a Navajo deacon with the Jesuits began praying. Dan was very moved by the end of the prayer cycle.
I stayed afterwards when the rest of the guests had left and Dan spoke to me about his memories of his adopted brother. I was entirely unprepared and had nothing useful to add, but really Dan just wanted to ask his questions out loud. His brother had left behind a girlfriend, with a child, who leaned on Dan for support.
Dan said he used to speak with his brother about these types of “why” questions. Now he was at a loss. I felt unable to do anything except sit there and listen. I shared all I knew how to say. It seemed to be enough. Or maybe Dan just recognized that I had tried.
The Coeur d’Alene novelist Sherman Alexie visited the National Museum of the American Indian and spoke in the first floor theater. Rick West introduced him. This was before both of them had endured public accusations of wrong doing. All of that was in the future.
Sherman accepted the microphone passed to him and politely thanked the Smithsonian for inviting him. Then he teased Rick West about his expensive Armani suit. Apparently, everyone always knew. Sherman then told jokes about himself, interspersed with stand-up routines with sudden sharp shifts to serious issues.
Alexie shifted to the right of the stage while taking a sip of water. “Why do you white liberals love us so much?” he asks, “We’re a group who firmly support the military, have large families, love our guns and hunting. I mean really, why?”
He sighed for a second and, smiling to himself. “And admit it, if you’re native, one time or another, you’ve thought that you had the power to speak to animals. One time when no one was looking you looked at that squirrel and tried to talk to it, didn’t you?” Sherman chuckles to himself and stares down for a second. He paced over to the other side of the stage and started a new story.
Dan told me a week before he officially alerted the museum. One day, he woke up and just knew he had to leave DC. He made a deal with his landlord about sub-letting his apartment. He said he moved to DC when he felt he should and now it was time to go home. Two days before he left, he invited me to his house. I came to say goodbye, but Dan offered to give me several of his belongings. He couldn’t afford to move to New Mexico anything that couldn’t fit in his luggage. Did I want canned food? How about sets of dishes and bowls?
I did the noble thing and told him I couldn’t take his things. He rolled his eyes and said that if I did not take them he would give them to someone else. They were going to go one way or another. He wasn’t keeping them. But he hesitated a split second before he offered me a thickly padded oversized blanket he had found in the Gathering of the Nations festival. It had kept him warm all that winter in the drafty apartment. Without thinking, I told him I would be able to send the blankets to him in Arizona if he gave me an address. I was moving to Boston a month after he left, so I had a lot of big boxes handy.
Dan was overjoyed, and thanked me much more than I wanted him to. Dan always seemed grateful for only the barest essentials of kindness. He moved from DC the next day just as quickly as he had come. He’d never quite felt at home in the marbled streets of the national mall. “You’ve got my number,” he said. “If you ever need a place to crash while driving through the Southwest, or if you happen to attend the Gathering of Nations festival, give me a call.”
“Sure thing.”
The National Museum of the American Indian is constructed with Kasota limestones that glow red in the rosy dawn light. They fade into a dusky orange as the sun sinks. The museum is curved and built like a southwestern pueblo tribe dwelling. There are no corners to be found there because there are no corners in nature.
Douglas Cardinal of the Blackfeet designed the building. He designed it to look like a natural formation carved slowly by wind, water and time. He was hired in 1993 but in 1998, the powers that be disputed his design and he left. “Creative differences.”
Even in his absence the building was built much as he imagined it. Large and roughly hewn stones sit at the base of the structure as if the museum had arisen from the earth itself. As the building rises up to five floors, the stones become smoother, mixed with bronze, copper and American Mist Granite. The architecture of the building was designed to contrast strikingly with the marbled facades of the US Capitol across the street.
In front of the museum is a pond where geese and ducks crash down into the water and hide in the reeds and miniature marshes filled with lotus. The small pond tells the story of Tiber Creek, a small marsh that once ran into the Potomac on the spot where the US Capitol now sits.
I kept one Navajo patterned wall hanging that reminded me of Dan, but once I was in Boston I got busy and lost contact. I never called that phone number.
Years later, I saw that wall hanging and wondered how Dan was doing. I checked his MySpace page and found he hadn’t updated it in over a year. It seemed odd, but perhaps like me he’d just gotten busy with life and forgot. I typed out a quick message for Dan and sent it. Before I could close the webpage, I noticed the comments that other friends had left for him. All of them spoke about how much they missed him.
I became concerned and after a few minutes of searching the web, I learned what had happened. Dan Davis had been listed as missing, probably murdered, and the case is still unsolved. Those who knew him best said that he’d been helping out someone who looked down-and-out, another drifter. They said he’d offered a place in his apartment.
He was officially missing but his apartment was burned, most likely to erase the evidence of the violence that had been done to him.
Officially, the police have filed Dan as a missing person for the past few years but the evidence at the scene combined with what I, and all his many friends, knew to be true about this gentle man makes only one conclusion likely. No trace of the drifter or Dan has been found. But the site with this information overflowed with kind remembrances of the many ways that Dan Davis had touched lives around the nation.
As the tragedy had happened a year earlier, it was too late for me to add to all of the digitized eulogies.
The last post he’d posted was an eerie meditation on the afterlife, and hell. He’d had a premonition of something and had strove to get his house in order, spiritually speaking. I don’t know if he did, but I certainly pray it was so.
There were no other posts.
Years later, I accompanied my wife as she did a medical rotation in the Navajo reservation, very near Dan’s White Mountain Apache reservation. I thought of him frequently when I saw the drifters floating silently through the broad empty streets of where we were staying: Shiprock, New Mexico.
Later that week, I visited the nearby four corners monument which is bounded on four sides by four rows of kiosks for native small businesses to sell their wares. I stopped and chatted with one shopkeeper with a Steelers hat and we bonded over our shared love of the Steelers. I told him I lived in Pittsburgh a year prior, and he said he’d give anything to get out of this dump and go to Pittsburgh. I said I thought the southwest was beautiful, and he said, “If you say so.”
On the opposite bank of booths, there was a middle-aged native woman playing hymns from her booth with large, colorful kids book covers that read “Jesus Loves You.”
I stopped to buy a necklace from her.
I thought of Dan again as I drove back into Shiprock and past the many churches that lined the street off the main drag. There were only three varieties: Baptist, Pentecostal/Evangelical and Catholic. I attended a Catholic service with my wife and noticed two little kids climbing all over their infinitely patient mother. During the passing of the peace, both proudly darted around the service and shook every hand they could find. The little boy arrived back to his mother and proudly exclaimed:
“I peaced everybody!”
NB – a friend asked me for some more of the story, and I shared it with him privately, but the more I prayed about it, the more I felt I ought to share it with all other readers as well...
PS - Thank you to Ókásu Wómpsacuckquâuog for her help with editing this article.
Thanks for sharing these experiences. I was reminded of conversations with my boys about naming conventions. We read a mix of history books: some older, some newer, some Canadian and they have come across lots of different terms. Sometimes they argue about which one to pick. It would be easier to have one label, but I know it isn’t that easy. I tell them it is complicated, people have different preferences, and try to be respectful when you talk about others, but know there isn’t one label that is best. Having spent a lot of my life in New Mexico, I had an appreciation that there are many tribes with different languages, traditions, and histories. I don’t have in depth knowledge of any of them, I just know enough to know that I don’t know anything and not to guess or over generalize.
I am sorry about your friend. He sounds like he was a good man.
This was a beautiful read. Thanks for sharing.