Of Spirit and Blood

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

The video playing on the TV set in the simulated living room features a confrontation between two young, dark-haired women. "Where'd you get that necklace?" demands one, indicating a strand of white carved stones and shells. "It was my grandmother's," says the other. "Is your grandmother Indian?" "Of course," comes the reply. "Are you an Indian?" "Yes." "You don't look Indian." "Well, I am." "No, you're not." "Oh, yes, I am." The woman with the necklace rummages through her purse, then produces an ID card. Her interrogator beams in belated recognition: "Sister!" A voice- over admonishes, "Never leave the rez without it."

The video and its setting make up just one of dozens of striking exhibits in perhaps the smartest display of Native American culture ever assembled: the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian, which opens this week in New York City. The museum is housed in the Beaux Arts splendor of the 1907 Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House, which has been elegantly restored and renovated by Ehrenkrantz & Eckstut Architects. Its permanent collection boasts the million-plus artifacts collected by George Gustav Heye, a turn-of-the-century New York City banker who bought out Indian communities much the way William Randolph Hearst emptied Spanish monasteries. One section of the museum, called "Creation's Journey," displays such Heye treasures as the famous, blood-red Crow shield, featuring a haunting human figure incorporating the actual body of a stork, which figured prominently in a Crow triumph over the Cheyenne; a gemlike Pomo hummingbird-feather basket; and an exquisite ceremonial mask from the 19th century Pacific Northwest.

The second gallery, "All Roads Are Good," is also filled with Heye art. But instead of choosing the pieces themselves, the curators turned to 23 Native American "selectors," whose personal reflections take precedence over academic labels. The Ojibwe canoemaker Earl Nyholm presents a brace of his tribe's exquisitely beaded bandolier bags, including one decorated with a Stars-and-Stripes motif. In spite of history, Nyholm recalls how the flag and the Fourth of July were readily adapted into Ojibwe culture and ceremony.

However, it is only in the museum's third gallery, "This Path We Travel: Celebrations of Contemporary Native Creativity," that the museum's full originality becomes clear. A walk-through, multimedia collaboration by 15 contemporary Indian artists, it is irreverent, sometimes heavy-handed and very of-the-moment. It ends with a meditation on the fate of the earth titled Worldview, dominated by a traditional burial scaffolding embedded with a parking meter permanently stuck on time expired and set up next to a video monitor screening images of war. Previous Indian museums, says director Richard West, "felt they were doing civilization and humanity a favor by saving material of people who everybody assumed were headed for extinction. I wanted to make sure that ours did not lapse into interpreting Indians as a historical phenomenon." Himself a Southern Cheyenne, West declares: "We're here. And we like to think that we have a future."

In fact, right now is a fine moment for Native American culture, both high and pop. The museum's opening is a prelude to the much larger, $60 million | Smithsonian Indian edifice to be opened in Washington in 2001. And it coincides with the vast, vastly earnest, 6-hr. recasting of Indian history on Ted Turner's TBS (the sound track, featuring Mohawk singer-songwriter Robbie Robertson, forms the basis of a critically acclaimed CD). In Buena Vista, California, Disney artists are shaping the studio's next big-ticket animated film: Pocohantas.

Yet as the Heye Museum videotape suggests, notwithstanding this spate of good publicity (and some modest but real political and financial gains), Native Americans are struggling with the wages of survival. Once the only people on the North American continent, they have persevered as an ethnic minority only to face the classic minority dilemma of whether to assimilate or to affirm a separate identity -- and, if they choose the latter, they further face a raft of federal definitions that can profoundly affect their economic welfare. The result is painful tensions between individuals and between tribes. Says an Indian activist: Just the question of how much Indian blood an individual possesses has become "a kind of built-in self-destruct button."

The most searing issue of identity stems from a 1953 congressional policy, bluntly titled "termination." The Federal Government severed its legal obligations to some 50 tribes and groups, and relocated thousands of people from their reservations into nearby cities. Tribal protests in the '60s and '70s forced the government to change its policy, and many Indians reclaimed their roots. By the 1990 census, a record 1.9 million people were self- identified Native Americans.

But perplexing questions remain among Indians about who is and is not one of their own -- and there is nothing so simple as an Indian ID card to provide an answer. Since the infancy of the U.S. government, Indians have had standing only if they hailed from a federally "recognized" tribe: usually one with whom the government had made a treaty. Today the Interior Department recognizes 550 tribes; there are 120 others vying for recognition. At first glance, some of the key recognition criteria seem sensible enough: a tribe's members must live in a specifically Indian community; they must be able to prove continuous "tribal political influence . . . throughout history." The problem is that many of the applicant groups are tattered remnants of Eastern and California tribes that were outlawed and hunted. Continuous community and "political influence" are hard to prove and difficult to apply.

In the late 1980s a sweet series of Indian triumphs had some bitter by- products. Some recognized tribes won the right to run high-stakes gambling, regardless of prohibitions in bordering states. The result: a handful became fabulously rich, and needed income began to flow to some other poor reservations. But friction increased between recognized and unrecognized tribes.

The lure of gambling money has also added a nasty edge to the already tangled problem of who belongs to a tribe. In 1934 most recognized groups adopted the Interior Department's preferred mechanism for determining tribal membership: a "blood quantum," under which anyone with 25% or 50% Indian blood qualified. Today the required amount is most commonly 25%. Some Indian activists find the quanta a demeaning colonial artifact. Others suggest that with Indians scattered off reservation, it is the only way to determine who is connected to a tribe.

There is a line of thought that some of the urgency behind "who's an Indian" might fade if it were made clear that there were different degrees of Indianhood. Says Rosemary Richmond, director of New York City's American Indian Community House (and a Mohawk): "We have to agree at what point you cease to be Indian when it comes to receiving services. Past that point, you're simply of Indian descent." Such subdividing would not solve squabbles over casino rights, but might allow the blond New Englander with 1/32 kinship in an unrecognized tribe to claim a kind of Indianhood without being shouted down.

And then there is the Pequot model. The Pequots, with proceeds exceeding $1 million a day, are Indian gambling's biggest winners. They are also a tiny (310-member) tribe. To remedy that, they now accept as a Pequot anyone with a 1/16 blood quantum. Bruce Kirchner, a tribal elder, sees further liberalization in the future: "At 1/16," he reckons, "you die out. We leave it open to future generations whether they want to go to 1/32."

Hence, a tribal population that looks like a Benetton ad. A reporter driving through the luxurious Connecticut reservation stops to ask directions of a bunch of boys riding new dirt bikes. They crowd around the car -- one with spiky blond hair, another black as ebony, still another who actually looks Indian. "Are you all tribal members?" the reporter asks. "Yeah," says a black kid. "We're all in the tribe." That's cool, offers the reporter. Answers a white kid: "Of course it's cool!"

To some non-Indians -- indeed, to some Indians -- this may seem like a farce: like getting Other Americans to play Native Americans. But that may be shortsighted. What the white man's guns put asunder, his gambling money is now helping to reconstitute. Like the Heye Museum's collaborative project, the reconstituted Pequots may not be Indian in the traditional, old-museum sense. But they are exuberantly representative of what museum director Richard West calls "a living culture."

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington, Hannah Bloch/New York, Massimo Calabresi/Mashantucket, Nancy Harbert/Albuquerque and Sarah Tippit/Orlando