[Ms. Muir is a historian, book reviewer and winner of the 2001-02 Massachusetts Book Award for Reflections in Bullough's Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England (University Press of New England).]

The National Museum of the American Indian is an architectural triumph. Walking close to the walls conveys the vertiginous sense of hiking the rock canyons of the American West. The galleries inside are punctuated by windowed spaces offering spectacular views of the National Gallery and the United States Capitol, and prism windows near the top of the dome paint rainbows on the walls of the atrium. Step a hundred yards away from NMAI, however, and the building turns into a yellow sandstone affront to the white granite unity of the National Mall. As with the container, so with the contents. It is as though the architect and curators together are saying, "You want to know how much respect we have for your European heritage of architectural symmetry, historical causation, and scholarly standards of evidence? None."

The permanent exhibits are arrayed in three large halls, each featuring eight kiva-shaped spaces in which one of the Indian Nations tells its story. Our Lives features "survivance," a term coined by Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor to mean, "doing what is necessary to keep our cultures alive." Our Peoples is about "how eight communities understand their cultural identities." The third hall, Our Universe, which is the place where most visitors will begin, explains how "Traditional knowledge shapes our world." None of the three halls portrays Indian history and life with anything resembling the kind of scholarly standards envisioned by James Smithson when that gentleman, chemist, mineralogist and Member of the Royal Society, left his fortune for the foundation of an institution for the "increase and diffusion of knowledge."

Our Universe is a marvel of a-historicism. In it, visitors learn not only that Indian "ceremonies, celebrations, languages, arts, religions, and daily life" are timeless, unchanging and unchanged for thousands of years, but that contemporary Indians continue to believe in and practice the rituals of an animistic faith in which "Everything in the...world is alive. Everything has a spirit and everything is interconnected." Contemporary Hupa Indians of Northern California believe that "three ceremonial dances...keep life in balance." And "In our songs and dances we (K'apovi Indians of New Mexico) call on the clouds, the directions, and the Mountain Spirits to help us." The exhibit places each of the eight featured tribes on a helpful map. Displays then mix photographs of contemporary Indians performing timeless animist rituals with artifacts collected a century ago and artifacts produced yesterday, depicting both beliefs and rituals as though they were unchanging since the beginning of time ("During the Jump Deer dance the spirits of the ancestors watch from behind a cedar-plank house"), and still the focus of Indian worship ("Sasquatch teaches honesty.... His honesty encourages people to be honest with themselves").

Only one of the eight Indian Nations featured in Our Universe is depicted as having encountered Christianity. The Yupik explain that "Just as we believe in God, our ancestors believed that everything we received from the land came from Elam Yua." A visitor to the museum who explores all of the twenty-four rooms featuring Indian nations, will see, in addition to the Yupik exhibit, only a panel describing the coming of the Jesuits to the Tohono O'Odham tribe, along with a panel describing a contemporary Anglican Indian church in Chicago, to balance an overwhelming array of photos, music, and voices depicting a Indian world of practicing, believing animists. The 2001 American Religious Identification Survey conducted by the City University of New York found that the religious profile of Indians in the U.S. is actually about the same as for white, non-Hispanic Americans: 20% of American Indians self-identified as Baptist, 17% as Catholic and 17% indicated no religious preference. Only 3% indicated their primary religious identification as an "Indian" or tribal religion.

The 80% of Indians who identify as Christian are given very little voice in this museum. Where they do appear, as in a lone panel on the San Xavier Mission at the Tohono O'Odham reservation, Christianity is paired with animism, in this case a panel headed, "Birds Teach People to Call for Rain," and viewed from the animist perspective: "For a long time our people had a hard time understanding Christian ideas. To us, the house of God is the whole environment. But Kino told us the mission church was the house of God. How could the Church be the only place to make contact with God? Our people were persecuted for practicing our religion and ceremonies." "Kino" is a reference to Jesuit missionary Father Eusebio Kino who arrived at Tohono O'Odham in 1687; in many circles he continues to be admired as an evangelist, explorer, and agriculturalist who introduced numerous Old World crops to the Southwest. He built the San Xavier del Blanc Mission, the White Dove of the Desert, a masterpiece of mission architecture, its dazzlingly carved, gilded and painted interior presumed to have been the work of Tohono craftsmen. There is no hint in the exhibit that San Xavier del Blanc is the sort of active parish that runs a flourishing parochial school and requires three masses on Sunday to accommodate all its congregants. Such facts would not fit the timeless, animist world of the NMAI.

The melding of past, present and future into an unchanging whole is deliberate. "Europeans," an exhibit informs us "emphasize a sequential presentation of events or ideas," but "for Native nations of the Americas...the circular manner of perceiving past and present, rather than seeing one event simply following another, is most important as a way to think about Native American history."

No scholar understands the past as "one event simply following another." Quite the contrary, historians regard the sequence of the past as revealing complex chains of causation. They insist that evidence-based study of the past is a powerful tool for understanding both the past itself and why contemporary people define themselves and their communities in the infinitely varied ways that they do. Eschewing any sense of historical development, NMAI curators refrain from asking why things are the way they are, or how they came to be that way. ...