On two compelling sides to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum
& Research Center.
There’s just something about having a scholarly conference at a historic or
cultural site—I felt it with the 2009 NEASA conference at the Lowell Boott Cotton Mills Museum, the
2010 conference at the Mass Historical Society,
and certainly with my own 2011 conference
at Plimoth Plantation; and I felt it again, with particular force and
clarity, this past weekend. Partly it’s a matter of direct contexts—the potent
benefit to talking about issues of Native American identity, community,
history, sovereignty, and so many more in one of the region and nation’s most
impressive spaces devoted to those themes. But it goes way beyond that—many of
the panels had nothing explicitly to do with Native American issues, but were
nonetheless enriched immeasurably, as were the conference’s more informal and
ongoing conversations and connections, by their surroundings.
There’s far more to say about those surroundings, about the Museum, than I can
include here—I’ve already urged
you to check it and other regional Native American museums out for yourself,
and you should! But I did want to take this opportunity to highlight two very
distinct but equally compelling and significant aspects of the Museum. First, I
was struck during this visit by the genuine breadth of the Museum’s permanent exhibits,
which guide visitors from the Ice Age up through contemporary life on the
nearby reservation, with numerous stops along the way. In its own way, and
despite the far more limited resources and space, the Museum tells a parallel
story to the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural
History, just filtered through the lens provided by this particular place
and community. As such, visitors to the Museum come away with a deeply
contextual and compelling sense of life (in every way) as it has unfolded for first
millions of years, then thousands of years, then the last few centuries, and
then in the daily experiences of contemporary Americans. That’s a really
ambitious goal, and one the Museum pulls off in spades.
The second aspect I want to highlight couldn’t feel more different, but is
unquestionably part of our 21st century engagement with the place
and with Native American communities overall: the Museum is located adjacent to
Foxwoods, the resort casino
operated by the Mashantucket
Pequot tribe. Two of my NEASA Council colleagues and friends, Michael Millner and Jonathan Silverman, gave excellent
talks on the complex relationships between the tribe, the casino, other
historic and cultural sites, and images and realities of Native American life
(past and present). As Jonathan in particular acknowledged, the casino is an
incredibly fraught and contradictory space, one that represents on the one hand
an important step forward for the tribe and yet on the other hand conjures up
(in its own iconography and in
the popular imagination) images that are at best stereotyped and at worst
directly harmful toward Native Americans (I once heard an intelligent and
generally well-informed woman argue that since the casinos now exist, Native
Americans must be doing very well and certainly don’t need our help any more). But
whatever we make of it, to my mind a visit to the Museum should also include a
thoughtful encounter with Foxwoods—just try to keep your wallet safely out of
reach while you’re there.
Next follow up tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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