On the National Museum of the American Indian

I’ve always been a museum aficionado. It might be in my blood – my grandfather, a malacologist, was affiliated with the Academy of Natural Science, and my visits to their museum with my mother as a kid to see their dinosaurs and gemstones still loom large in my memory. My first visit to New York, long before I considered moving here, was as a kid of maybe 4 or 5, intent on visiting the American Museum of Natural History. As time went on, I went to a lot of museums, studied museums in hyper-academic mumbo-jumbo in college, and even worked at one, when I was an historical interpreter at Monticello. Since entering the numismatic field full-time, I’ve been lucky to work with a lot of them, occasionally consulting, sometimes just volunteering, but always doing something fun with the bright, interesting people who serve as museum staffers and curators.

This past weekend I got to visit one I’d long looked forward to – the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) on the National Mall in Washington DC. Founded in 1989, the museum didn’t open until 2004, housed in a tip-o-the-hat-to-the-Guggenheim rounded building faced with an unfinished sandstone, evocative of a Western rock formation. It’s four stories tall, wrapped around a massive round performance / gathering space with a 120 foot ceiling. They recommend you go to the top and come down, starting with a film (which I skipped, because I almost always find them tedious).
The displays focused less on objects and more on culture, with all of the interactive and audio/visual tools that define modern museum science. The museum covers all native American cultures, from the Arctic to South America, and plays off the contrasts and remarkable similarities in the culture and worldview of tribes from both extremes. Most of the museum is steeped in the present – if you’re looking for mannequins wearing feather headdresses and moccasins, you won’t find much. But, of course, there are plenty of interesting historical object mixed into the narrative to offer interest to those intrigued more by the 18th century than the 21st.

My favorite individual object was, unsurprisingly, from the American colonial era. Attributed to the Mahicans of Western Massachusetts circa 1750, it’s a really gnarly club – wood with an implanted sword tip, a la tomahawk, in the shape of a sturgeon. The decoration, reminiscent of the engravings on a French and Indian War powder horn, includes an image of an Indian holding a tomahawk.

Killer fish


It’s beautiful, with fine folk engraving and the same gorgeous old patina as the stock of a Brown Bess rifle. It’s whimsical, yet deadly – you could get seriously brained with this thing, and it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that several did.

My favorite display was the literal wall of guns, suspended in plexiglass, ranging from early flintlocks to semi-automatic rifles. There were plenty of jaw-dropping historical guns, many once the property of famous Indians like Sitting Bull or Chief Joseph. On the same floor, a display on gold was equally staggering when you first round the doorway to see it. Beginning with pre-Colombian gold relics, it tells the history of the precious metal and its affect on the native tribes from Brazil to Sutter’s Mill. There are plenty of numismatic items mixed in – a tumbaga bar (one of my favorite historical items I’ve ever gotten to research and handle) was a surprise to see, considering their obscurity beyond numismatic circles. There were lots of gold coins, nothing remarkable numismatically, but all appropriate to the exhibit – eight escudos, Brazilian 20000 reis, several different denominations from the Fleet of 1715, and more. Several were upside down, but such things are forgivable – let’s be honest, a cob is pretty confusing to look at even for most coin collectors.

The Indian Peace medal display, and the interpretation of its objects, could use some improvement. The museum has some really exceptional medals among its collection, led by a 1795 oval George Washington Indian Peace medal by Joseph Richardson. That medal, which I believe was on loan from the National Portrait Gallery, was simply gorgeous, with the exact kind of impressively artful engraving one would demand of a genuine medal and a bold JR mark on the reverse. I couldn’t capture a good picture of it, and I can’t find an image anywhere on the NMAI or NPG websites, but it was beautiful. The other George Washington oval Indian Peace medal on display, dated 1792, was less convincing.

This is not to say it’s fake – just that its engraving was less refined, it lacked a makers mark, and its rim was not the typical style.

I don’t like to condemn – or really even speak ill of – things I haven’t actually examined in hand. A view with your nose pressed against the case is no substitute for holding something, turning it in your hands, putting a glass on it, and really getting to know its intricacies. That stated, I have very very serious concerns about the large size Jackson in the museum’s display.

The medal itself is very sharp, with only trivial marks that look to be too consistent to be accidental. The surfaces of a large size Jackson medal in high grade are almost always prooflike – they were struck in a reflective finish. This medal is matte and the color is even. It may be a silver coated bronze striking, or it may be some other kind of fake. But I think the chances of it being an authentic awarded Peace medal from Jackson’s administration is slim.

I’ve liked Peace medals a long time, and I’ve seen them in all sorts of settings – tiny country auctions, fresh from an Indian chief’s descendants, 19th century collections, museums, coin shows, etc. In all those years, I’ve never seen a genuine Indian Peace medal on a big fancy hanger. It doesn’t logically follow that any rule so silly could be hard and fast, but it is in my experience – when there are big beads, bear’s teeth, fur, fancy beaded things, “wampum,” or anything similar, the medal is almost always some kind of fake. I don’t know why such things are added to fake medals so often in an attempt to indicate their authenticity, but it’s nearly 100% contraindicative. This Jackson medal comes on such a fancy hanger. I’m not a specialist on Native American objects, so I can’t tell you that it’s not a real something, but I don’t think it belongs with the medal it’s with now.

A gift for Chief Liberace?

The provenance of the Jackson medal also bothers me. It doesn’t make much sense that a Jackson medal would come from the upper Missouri, which did not get a lot of attention from Jackson’s administration. If the medal migrated there over time through trade, one would think it would be more worn. If it came from Wisconsin, or Arkansas, or Indiana, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Montana seems less likely.

But there were some superb medals too. A well worn Madison large size that belonged to a Sac and Fox Chief named … Ulysses Grant.

A Franklin Pierce medium size medal with a provenance to Wisconsin, and what looks to be its original ribbon.

This ribbon is instructive – it looks very similar to the ribbons depicted on most paintings of medal-wearing Indians of the era.

Elsewhere, the museum had a display of Indian images on U.S. coins and currency … that was almost entirely empty, where rows of obsolete and Federal currency that were once on display were replaced by LOAN EXPIRED cards. It’s a pity the museum hadn’t nailed down a loan from the museum across the National Mall to fill some of those holes again. Hopefully they will in time.
The museum was beautiful, the displays were instructive, the layout and approach was innovative, and the flow was mostly intuitive. It’s easy for a specialist (like, say, a coin and medal nerd) to pick on one little aspect. When I was a Monticello tour guide, we used to complain about the people who tried to play “stump the tour guide,” the odd person who liked to ask super-obscure questions about French provincial door hinges to show off just how much they knew about French provincial door hinges. Museum staff have to know enough to talk to experts in an enormous diversity of specialized fields, yet haven’t got the time to become specialists in more than one or two fields in many cases. I plan to reach out to the NMAI to see if I could examine the medals in person at some point and make a better conclusion about their authenticity – and if that happens, I’ll be sure to post the results here.

If you can get to DC, the museum is well worth a visit, and there is something numismatic on nearly every floor. If the displays weren’t enough to lure you, consider this: the cafeteria is literally the finest museum cafeteria I’ve ever been in anywhere in the world.