never been to and thought Spring Break offered a good chance to get to know.NMAI is located, with or without irony, in the 101-year-old New York Customs House on Bowling Green, near the ferry terminals. It's part of the Smithsonian, and I was going to see an exhibit of Pacific Northwest artifacts, mainly collected (under circumstances one would rather not ponder) in the 19th century, but for this exhibition selected, arranged and explained by contemporary Native Americans and Canadian First Peoples. It was sort of like some exhibits of Aboriginal objects I saw in Australia in spirit. Many of the objects were fascinating; some masks have the beauty and danger of Noh masks - wish I could have seen them in use.
A propos Australia, I overheard a guard tell someone there was a film showing at 1:00 so I went. (I was the only one person watching.) It was "Vis à Vis: Native Tongues," a 2003 TV film which brought two artists - a Western Australian Aboriginal actor and a Native American performance artist - into conversation by live video. (Kind of like Skype avant la lettre, and appropriate, somehow: these are artists grounded in their place, they're not globe-trotters, and don't need to be. New media's conquest
of space can deepen the experience of place!) As luck would have it, the actor - Ningali Lawford - lives in Melbourne, so we got to see scenes of Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, just a few blocks from where I lived in Carlton. And the performance artist - James Luna - lives on the La Jolla Indian Reservation in San Diego County! This came pretty close to home, twice over. (I'm like many settler Americans who needed to go to Australia to become conscious of continued Native American dispossession back home, so this was just what the doctor ordered... I went to NMAI because of consciousness raised - in part - in Western Australia, but had yet to connect this consciousness with the part of the American West I call home.) Luna's work is powerful (though less his present exhibit than some of the earlier projects he showed Ningali and her friends and family); hope I can get a chance to see one of his performances live in San Diego!But I had to move on and get ready for the evening, which I did by watching "U-Carmen," the first film by the team which put together "Son of Man." I knew it was a setting of Bizet's Carmen in a South African township with many of the same actors (Pauline Malefane, the splendid Carmen, is an even more impressive Mary in the later film),
but was unprepared for it to be Bizet's opera, sung operatically with orchestra (but in Xhosa)! It's a marvelous film. (It's on Netflix.)"Son of Man," which I've now seen four times (!), is a fine work, too. I won't tire you with what I offered the audience who had come to see the film in the lovely sanctuary of Middle Collegiate Church, well not with all of it. But let me tell you it did give me a chance to reflect on indigenization: seeing the familiar story made unfamiliar (but also familiar in new ways) in this different cultural setting lets one sense not just the supposed universality of the Jesus story, but the ways in which the received western version is itself an indigenization, albeit so old it's easy to forget about. So it was especially nice to be seeing this black South African Jesus and his powerful mother in a sanctuary lined with Tiffany glass windows of a very fair-haired lily-white Jesus!
What would a Native American or Aborigene Jesus look like, feel like?
In a comedy skit called "Black and Tran" which she performs with a Vietnamese-Australian comedian, Ningali Lawford asks: "How do we know Adam and Eve weren't Aboriginal? They would have eaten that snake!"
