The New York Times
July 26, 1998, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
Tribal Windfall: A Chance to Reopen History
MASHANTUCKET, Conn.
By KAY LARSON; Kay Larson, a former art critic of New York magazine, is writing a book about the origins of post-Minimalist art.
THE month of July on B. Kliban's 1998 cat calendar: Three cats row a dinghy to the beach. A tribe of mice innocently paddles its teacups out to meet them. The lead cat raises a paw: an ominous hello. The first contact between Indians and Europeans at Plymouth was most likely that friendly. The cat-and-mouse encounter that swiftly followed, however, has shaped the American mind right down to its taste in kitsch.
Indians, too, sometimes see themselves in rosy simplifications. Consider the two-and-a-half-ton, cast-crystal brave kneeling under a glass dome at the hub of Foxwoods Resort Casino here in southeastern Connecticut. Four times an hour the Indian's laser arrow pierces the sky, invariably bringing rain. Which is what this vast gambling complex is for its owners, the Mashantucket Pequot Indians: a rainmaker.
The steady shower of cash, however, has allowed the Pequots to strip back the myth of Puritans and Indians and address a much grittier and more complex reality.
On Aug. 11, the Pequots will open an impressive $135 million museum on their reservation to tell the tribe's story, one of war, betrayal, near extermination and belated resurrection. Designed by Polshek and Partners of Manhattan, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center is, you might say, the best-endowed Indian museum ever. Its 308,000 square feet (85,000 for exhibits alone) compares in size to the Holocaust Museum in Washington and is 20 percent larger than the proposed National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, to which the Pequots gave $10 million.
The Pequots' tale unfolds in a research facility intended to reflect, like a natural-history museum, recent discoveries in paleoethnography and archeology. Even more than for its architecture, which is fluent and sleek, the museum is notable for its effort to join science and storytelling. And since this is an Indian museum created by Indians, there are "smudging areas," so that sacred objects can be smoked over a sweetgrass fire, and coding systems, so that people (especially women) will not handle things off limits to them.
This from a tribe that numbered 66 in the 1910 census. So the first question may be: Pequot who?
Living on the land around Mystic, Conn., alongside tribes like the Mohegan and the Podunk, the Pequots ran afoul of the Puritans shortly after landfall at Plymouth in 1620. Even then, neither side could comprehend the other. Escalating hostilities led to the first outright war between northeastern colonists and Indians, one that presaged later disasters. Its sources have been debated ever since.
The Pequot war preceded the Salem witchcraft hysteria by a mere three decades. From the outset, the Puritan clergy denounced Indians as devil-worshipping witches destined for damnation. Pequots, on the other hand, often tortured, flayed and roasted captives; other tribes sided with the British against them. The war, which nearly obliterated the Pequots, opened the Connecticut coast to settlers, who paid off their debts with the fur trade they comandeered from the Pequots.
The basic facts of the massacre are agreed upon. In 1637, British militiamen and their Narragansett allies surrounded a Pequot fortified village and set it afire. In the chaos, men, women and children burned or were speared to death. Pequot captives were beheaded or sent into slavery. Local tribes were stunned by European scorched-earth brutality. The Puritan clergy rejoiced. A leader of the raid declared, "We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings."
The passions of this event and the subsequent quarrels over its interpretation are the originating points for some familiar myths of the frontier. Melville, sympathizing with the Indians, sent Captain Ahab after the white whale in a ship, the Pequod, that represents the blind wrath of the European mind desperate to subdue the mystical unknown. John Wayne, siding with the settlers, scoured the desert in "The Searchers" to rescue Natalie Wood, who had been abducted by Indians, a tale originally enacted when Pequots stole two girls in a bloody raid that precipitated the massacre.
The justifications used in killing Pequots, some historians say, were knitted into the ideology of Manifest Destiny.
The Mashantucket Pequot museum spreads its swooping concrete walls like gray gull wings into the cedar swamp where a handful of survivors regrouped after the massacre. Each generation of Pequot children since the debacle has heard that the rosebay rhododendrons growing wild in the swamp bloom red in remembrance.
In the museum meeting hall, where visitors first gather, a great arc of glass opens to the swamp and a view of rolling waves of trees stretches to the horizon. An escalator descends into a glacier of 11,000 years ago; after the retreat of the ice sheet, Indians moved into the boggy Maine-like landscape. A caribou hunt depicts Indian presence on this land through the millennia.
The heart of the museum is a 22,000-square-foot recreation of a Pequot village as it looked just before Europeans arrived: wigwams, cornfields, children at play, fishermen in a canoe. The smells of campfires and tanning hides mingle with the squawk of crows in the cornfield: sounds, smells and actions are mixed on a computer hard drive in a loop that never repeats itself. From the village, a floor laid with bloodwood -- a deep-red tropical hardwood -- leads toward the climactic moment. Conflicting accounts of the disagreements that led to the massacre -- those of the Dutch, the English, the settlers, the Indians -- line the walls. A film plunges the viewer into the massacre. Then comes a segue to the present. By 1970 only two Pequots, elderly half-sisters, lived on the Mashantucket reservation. Elizabeth George Plouffe, hearing a rumor that the state was poised to seize the land for a park, sent out a frantic call to her family.
"Get up here, I don't care how; if you have to pitch tents, it doesn't matter," her granddaughter, Theresa H. Bell, the executive director of the museum, recalls her saying. "My grandmother said, 'Don't give up.' She beat it into our heads from when we were this big."
Although no full-blooded Pequots remain, a couple of hundred of those who trace their ancestry to the 1910 census came back to the reservation. Living in a trailer with no running water and with an electric line strung from her grandmother's house, Ms. Bell, like her relatives, eked out a sparse existence. A similar trailer, on exhibition in the museum, is emblematic of modern reservation life and the Pequots' decadelong fight (ending in 1983) for Federal recognition as a tribe.
The determination to make a museum, Ms. Bell says, is as old as that call from her grandmother. Ms. Bell's brother, Richard (Skip) Hayward, the tribal chairman and leader of the Pequot revival, invited an anthropologist, Jack Campisi, to help him make the Pequot case to the Government. Mr. Hayward also asked Kevin A. McBride, an archeologist and ethnohistorian, to begin excavations on the Pequot land, digs that have led to such discoveries as the remains of a 1675 Pequot fortified village within yards of the museum.
Six years ago, when casino revenues made the museum possible, Mr. Campisi and Mr. McBride joined Ms. Bell on the management team. Mr. McBride took on the job of supervising the exhibition design, by Design Division of Manhattan. Not trusting any single interpretation, the tribal council requested original research. The Pequot story was extracted from the logs of explorers, the observations of evangelists, reservation records, maps, watercolors, archeological evidence. "Every fact is footnoted to a primary document," says Mike Hanke of Design Division.
The tribe put the design team through an "excruciating" review, said Mr. McBride, who teaches at the University of Connecticut. "It was far and above what I put my graduate students through."
Real Pequot artifacts are rare, and the museum team has asked native artisans to make new ones, fashioning them according archeologist's best estimates. Mr. McBride pointed to a little hemp bag woven by a Mashpee woman, its pattern based on three surviving bags in New England, its black-and-white geometric motif taken from Pequot pottery. "It took months and months to make," he said. "It's the first time anyone has seen one of these for 350 years."
If the figures in the museum look surprisingly realistic, it's because they are cast from faces and bodies of actual Indians. That fidelity to the Indian viewpoint extends to a hall where the creation myths of nine North American tribes are depicted as artworks alongside an explanation of the Beringian theory -- the migration across a land bridge from Asia -- espoused by modern science. The technology that drew "Jurassic Park" dinosaurs, meanwhile, digitally paints seven touch-screen interactive videos by the design company Nicholson NY. To make the two and a half minutes of animation leading a visitor through a Pequot fortified village required 25,000 hours of computer running time. Other computer stations introduce the Algonquin language (source of the now extinct Pequot tongue) and the caribou kill, which corresponds to an actual site recently excavated in the neighborhood.
Behind the visible parts of the museum are libraries and conservation and research labs uniting disciplines focused on North American tribes. Mr. McBride points to the scientists on staff: paleobotanists, ethnobotanists, ethnographers, soil analysts, theoretical linguists, metallurgists. The director of conservation, Doug Currie, recently completed an analysis of a 350-year-old corn field discovered buried in sand on Cape Cod. As in a natural-history museum, Mr. McBride says, research is expected to drive the staff's pursuits.
The museum brings that tough way of viewing evidence to the massacre itself. Contemporary revisionist thinking tries for a more balanced view of Indians as players in a vastly complex drama. " 'Lo, the poor natives' doesn't give them credit,' Mr. McBride said. "I think the Pequots were aggressive. They were not completely faultless, nor were they passive victims.'
"Nevertheless," he adds, "the massacre was the massacre." And like other traumas of history, it now has its own monument.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)