Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra features stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework, or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write an 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: American Indian Museum Offers Unique Voice, 09/22/04
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/july-dec04/indian_9-22.html

Initiating Questions:

1. What is the purpose of museums? Who do they serve?

2. What do you think of when you hear the term "Native American" or "American Indian?"

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. What museum just opened? Where is it located and why is it significant?

The 254,000 square foot Museum of the American Indian is the newest addition to the Smithsonian Institution. Situated close to the U.S. Capitol, it may be the last major addition to the museums and monuments that make up the National Mall, an irony clear to many native visitors.

"Kind of fitting," Merv George Sr., a Hupa medicine man, told the Washington Post. "First peoples here, last place on the Mall."

2. What is the mission of the museum and how do young people feel about this?

For 15-year-old Hupa Emmilee Risling, the mission of the museum - to present and encourage the contemporary living culture of the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere in their own voices - is in step with her thinking about herself and her culture.

"My culture is really important to me," Emmilee, vice president of her Native American Club in Hoopa, Calif., told the Washington Post. "That's the way I've been raised."

Nicole Soulier, 19, an Ojibwa Indian from Bad River, Wis., who joined the colorful procession of thousands who celebrated the opening of the museum, agreed.

"It's very important to represent where I come from, to celebrate with all the other nations," she told the New York Times.

3. What makes this museum unique?

According to museum spokesman Tom Sweeney, the museum's origins make it unique.

"Each tribe or native community represented has selected the objects that represent them and speak in their own voice - and that's the first time it's been done this way -- from the architecture, public programs to exhibitions," he explained.

4. How is the NMAI hoping to avoid traditional perceptions about museums?

Attempting to avoid traditional perceptions of museums as places highlighting the past, the NMAI creators hope visitors will recognize the active offerings of native peoples today.

"Visitors will leave this museum experience knowing that Indians are not part of history," founding director, W. Richard West, a Southern Cheyenne, said in a statement. "We are still here and making vital contributions to contemporary American culture and art."

5. What is a criticism of the new museum?

While others agree that the positive message fills them with pride, they think that the exhibits don't touch enough on the atrocities that Native Americans have suffered over five centuries.

"We know that Old Glory should have blood dripping from every star for wiping out native peoples, and that is not reflected here," Dwain Camp, of the Oklahoma-based Ponca tribe, told the Washington Post.

6. How does the architecture and landscaping around the building express native culture?

The building itself mirrors native sensibilities. Designed by Canadian Blackfoot architect Dougles Cardinal, who left the project amid a legal dispute in 1998, the outer shell is made of Kasota limestone from Minnesota. The color and dramatic curves are meant to suggest a native landscape. True to tradition, it faces East toward the rising sun.

"The form of the building is really organic and curvilinear because we wanted this building to appear as if it's an abstraction of a natural rock formation that's been carved by wind and water over time," said architect Duane Blue Spruce.

The exterior landscape features a wetlands area and important native crops such as corn and squash.

"The outside is an extension of the exhibit. It is an exhibit. It is who we are. From the native perspective, one shouldn't see the line between the building and the earth. That line shouldn't be there," said Donna House, a Navajo landscape architect and botanist.

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. Why might it be important for each native tribe to choose the way its culture is presented? What impact does this have on a museum experience? How might it affect the information presented?

2. Do you agree with some critics of the new NMAI museum that it is too positive and glosses over some painful events of the past? Why or why not? How should we as a nation deal with past atrocities?

3. Research the architecture and landscaping of the museum. How is it different and similar to other museums on the Mall? Explain some of the key differences and what they mean for the creators of the National Museum of the American Indian and indigenous peoples in general.

Write a 500-800 word essay on any of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org]. Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.