Discourse, cultural policy, and other mechanisms of power: The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian

This project explores the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) on the National Mall in Washington D.C. through a critical/cultural lens using a variety of qualitative methodological approaches including Foucauldian discourse analysis, surveys/interviews, archival work, and participant observation. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to inform the study of culture, media/communications, museums, cultural policy, and American Indian issues. The study situates the NMAI in terms of the emergence of ethnic museums starting in the latter half of the twentieth century and engages the shift in the museological self-understanding from static transmission of knowledge to dialogic, democratic participation in the midst of neo-liberal funding pressures. The museum positions itself as a reaction to the iconographic noble and ignoble savage constructs prevalent in the popular media and museums and understands itself as a communications technology, using a variety of media and high-technology devices to enter into public discourse about American Indian identity, emphasizing collaboration with American Indian people in the process of "giving voice." Its position within the national museum complex as a site of power and policy prescribing the repatriation of human remains and other forms of cultural patrimony suggest the new participants have been taken seriously. However, this project argues the NMAI, while acting as a technology of the self for both American Indian people and its mostly non-Native audience, has been shaped by its socio/economic/historical circumstances and stakeholders, from its American Indian constituency to non-Native tourists, benefactors, and partnering corporations. The museum has been charged with avoiding polemical issues in its attempt to meet expectations. I argue the construction of the pan-Indian within the museum still acts as a generalized identity discourse and is productive for the overarching goal of nation-building. The project explores the intersection between the national museum's new dialogic self-understanding and neo-liberal formation.;The following chapters introduce the project and lay out the theoretical and methodological approaches taken (Chapters I and II). They then describe the construction of American Indian identity in popular consciousness and its role in nation building (Chapter III), the museum's situatedness within cultural policy debates (Chapter IV), the various stakeholders with vested interest in the museum (Chapter V), and the use of media/technology devices, architecture, and semiotics to create "a Native Place" (Chapter VI). Finally, Chapter VII suggests Michel Foucault's governmentality is an appropriate analytic of power for understanding the museum and its complexities.