NMAI exhibition will explore hidden histories of race.

Byline: Jerry Reynolds

Oct. 31--WASHINGTON -- The full history of the Americas has been hiding in plain sight -- as plain as skin color -- for centuries, and under ordinary circumstances it might have stayed hidden for just a bit longer anyway.

"Generally, I think an exhibit at this phase -- the cat would not be out of the bag," said Gabi Tayac, a historian with the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian. But word of an NMAI exhibition on the intersecting histories of blacks and American Indians has met with intense interest, and it has only snowballed in recent weeks, as NMAI finalized a lineup of essays on the themes of African-Native American race, community, culture and creativity, according to Tayac of the core curatorial team and Fred Nahwooksy, the project coordinator.

"IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas," is scheduled to open in November 2008 with an exhibition of 20 "bannered panels" at NMAI in Washington. Media materials, a Web site with educational materials, and a publication will accompany the bannered panels -- museum lingo for the tall rectangular panels that present graphic materials and written information in a more or less narrative manner across a number of panels.

Nahwooksy said the bannered panels approach is a good one for Native communities. "In terms of low-cost, we're not worried about special museum environments in the museum at the tribal level -- heat, air, dust, clean, all that kind of stuff -- and so that's why this panel exhibit, or bannered as we call them, seems to be a workable format for tribal communities. It just so happens that this topic has such broad appeal that we are going to open it in our [NMAI's] two major cities of Washington, D.C., and New York, where we have facilities. And then it will go on from there.

We expect probably there will be two, three copies of this traveling around, one that kind of goes to mainstream museums that SITES [Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Services] will distribute, one that goes to Native communities, and African-American museum venues. ... We're considering a translation to Spanish, so that it can go to South America and certain Caribbean countries as well. That's all a matter of money, and we'll see how we do on the fund-raising. I expect we're going to hopefully do very well."

If funding follows the interest NMAI has met with so far, even at the present early stage of development, Nahwooksy's confidence will prove well-founded. The issue of freedmen -- descendants of slaves among modern tribes -- ...