| Fall 2006 |
After leaving the "Explore Evolution" exhibit, we moved down the thin, dimly lit hall, passing by and stepping over young children huddled together. Their eyes were all intently fixed on the elaborate Native American dioramas that inhabit the walls of much of the fourth floor of the museum. As they sat and stared, they carefully listened to their teachers who, in the simplest words, tried to convey to the children who the Native Americans were and how they lived. So too did I listen to my guide, John Klausmeyer, as we, standing above the children, observed and discussed the same dioramas.
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| Some of the figures from the controversial Native American dioramas.
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Yet while Native Americans are almost unified in their opposition against these exhibits, according to John they're not only the most popular exhibits in the museum, but also, when kids grow up, this is "the part of the museum they most vividly remember." Nevertheless, as a result of the complaints against the exhibits, John informed me that they would most likely be removed sometime in the future.
In understanding Native American opposition to the exhibits, one must look at the art of the diorama, the aesthetic tool through which history, anthropology, and sociology are conveyed, and dissect the historiography of the exhibits. In doing so, one may glean the basis for how the Western world interprets Native American culture and social memory.
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| The Native American dioramas on display on the fourth floor of the museum.
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Because the museum is honoring the wishes of Native Americans to have the exhibits removed, they face the question of deciding what to do with the exhibits once they're gone. As John said to me, the museum "offered one of them, an Anishinabe diorama, to an Anishinabe school in the Upper Peninsula. They were really excited about having it, which was sort of strange because Native Americans were the ones most vehemently opposed to them, but," he continued, "I guess as long as they have them then they're the ones in control of who's telling their story."
After visiting the geology room, the last exhibit area on the fourth floor, we made our way to the third floor, the "Michigan Wildlife Gallery," which houses exhibits of the local ecology. As John explained to me, people tend to either love or hate this section because of the use of taxidermy. He went on to tell me a story about how in one school tour group, "a kid mentioned how cool he thought this section was, but then he stopped and realized that these animals were, for the most part, shot and killed by hunters and then stuffed, so he got kind of upset." He continued, "Kids are becoming more and more sensitized to the fact that the animals were killed and that's how they got here."
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| Taxidermied animals from the third floor of the museum.
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Art can be a powerful tool in conveying and preserving an image of a culture or even a snapshot of the life of an animal. But because art is a tool with human hands, one must look at how these images are created and to what degree they accurately portray the subject they're focusing on. For the Native American exhibits, it's important to ask the question of who's controlling the storytelling and to what degree the exhibits represent a blend of both truth and myth, or muthos, a Greek word meaning 'story.' Storytelling is as old as man and it's far from immune to bias, whether it's racial, ethnic, or Western-oriented.
Moreover, science carries with it an air of objectivity—centuries of well-crafted tools, such as the scientific method, that act as oversight in guiding research, and for the most part these tools are reliable and trustworthy mechanisms for research-oriented work. Nevertheless, the way science is presented often requires a touch of the subjective, whether it's an exhibit, a model, or a research paper requiring the written word. Therefore, unless we understand the methods behind how science is presented to us, appearances can often be deceiving, such as the case with the taxidermied animals whose lifelike appearance carefully masks their death. This is especially the case when the images we're confronted with conform to our own preconceived notions of the truth or, more troublingly, when we project our notion of reality onto the unexplained, such as the age old view of our hominid ancestors as binaries separated into "Man the Hunter" and "Woman the Gatherer."
Because science is so ingrained in Western culture as a flawless tool, the knowledge and acceptance of the human element—including the cultural component of Western rationality—is often times forcefully forgotten. In that sense, like the children in John's anecdote who have become increasingly sensitized to how animals arrive in exhibit displays, so too must scientists and the public work together in scrutinizing the subjective layer of science, or, how science is essentially conveyed to the public.
Making the Museum: Part III
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