What's old is new: 'Here, Now and Always'

Jul. 8—details

—Here, Now and Always

—Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, 710 Camino Lejo,

—Ongoing

—Admission $12, with discounts available; 505-476-1269, indianartsandculture.org

Wearing a traditional Pueblo dress, a turquoise and silver squash blossom necklace, and moccasins, United States Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland was sworn into Congress in January 2019 as one of the first two Native women elected to the House of Representatives. On her Twitter account that day, she wrote "New Mexicans are in the house, the US House that is."

Haaland, who's also the first Native cabinet secretary in U.S. history, is changing the face of the political sphere. More and more representatives from Indigenous tribes are being elected to Congress, making an impact on the laws of the land.

They're still here, on this land. But there was a time in the not too distant past when the U.S. operated with the expectation that they wouldn't be, at least not as self-determining tribal entities. And so began a mad dash to preserve the record of what, at the end of the 19th century, was believed to be a dying culture if not race.

When Diane Bird (Santo Domingo Pueblo), archivist at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, approached Haaland at a talk one day at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, she asked the department secretary if she could include the dress that Haaland wore at her swearing in ceremony in the revamping of the exhibition Here, Now and Always.

"She started crying," Bird says. "But she gave us the dress."

Something about that dress feels like a kind of capstone to the reimagined exhibition.

Here, Now and Always, which is on long-term display, first opened in 1997. It covers the history of indigenous cultures of the Southwest, with a focus on New Mexico. In January 2020, the museum closed the exhibition to the public for an extensive renovation project. The audio/visual technology used for interactive exhibits was outdated. The halls were cramped. The exhibit hall needed a new HVAC system, a new security system, and something it already had but needed more of — a predominantly Native voice.

"One thing that I think is unique about the Southwest is we probably have about 25-plus tribes that are still on their homelands," says Bird, who put together a team of tribal representatives for the curation of her section (one of eight) of the exhibit. "Each curator had a team or person working with them. My part was a new section that was added because it has to do more with modern-day people and events than with historical facts. I had a team of 11 to 15 people, including non-Indians who had expertise in their areas. I had Jicarilla Apaches, Navajos, northern Pueblo, and southern Pueblo people."

All these tribes, as well as the Paiute and O'odham, are represented in the 8,400-square-foot space, which reopened on July 2 and features more than 600 objects, as well as recorded interviews and text panels, which place its 50 represented regional tribes in historic and contemporary contexts. The exhibit draws heavily on the museum's outstanding collections of ceramics, basketry, jewelry, paintings, textiles, and fashion.

The New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs anticipated that the redesign would take about 18 months, and a reopening was planned for the summer of 2021. The pandemic shut down work throughout much of 2020, delaying the reopening by a full year. A $460,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities was used in the initial stages, which began with the installation of the HVAC system. A campaign started by the Museum of New Mexico Foundation raised an additional $1.5 million to complete the project, which was estimated to cost $4.6 million in total.

Where past, present, and future converge

Tradition is living history. That's a sentiment underscored by the way Here, Now and Always is organized. Rather than a chronology, tracing the evolution of cultural advancements, art, and technology through time, a central hub — outfitted with displays on major life events such as birth, coming of age, and marriage — provides a jumping-off point for self-tailored tours.

Like spokes on a wheel, portals from the central hub fan out in multiple directions, leading to the themed displays Emergence, Cycles, Ancestors, Community, Home, Trade and Exchange, Language and Song, Arts, and Survival and Resilience, each of which are structured with recorded narratives and text that reflect knowledge of the displayed objects.

An authentic Jicarilla Apache teepee was donated to the exhibition's section on Community and Home, and the interior of a Navajo trading post was recreated on site as part of Trade and Exchange. The trading post installation covers the sometimes fraught but often mutually beneficial relationships between Native peoples and White traders and highlights the artistry of Navajo silver work. A small countertop display, arranged as it would be in a shop, features items collected by former museum curator Harry P. Mera's 1932 survey of trading posts on Navajo land. The display highlights silver's historic importance to the Navajo as a commodity in the exchange of goods.

The section on Native fashion includes contemporary styles that incorporate Pueblo pottery designs, and those motifs can be compared to designs on the actual pots that inspired them, examples of which are paired with the Native fashions to show that direct relationship. The inclusion of clay figurines and fashions by Cochiti Pueblo artist and designer Virgil Ortiz further reflect an Indigenous past reimagined in the present. Specifically, much of his work is focused on the 1680 Pueblo and Hopi Revolt, and he's developed a narrative in which those events are projected far into the future. Ortiz's story, which is rooted in history, is explored as an event in the year 2180.

The Revolt of 1680 was a singular moment in the history of Spanish Colonial and Indigenous relations, one that lead to greater autonomy and helped put an end to the many abuses suffered by regional tribes under the encomienda system, which sought labor and taxes from tribal peoples and aimed to indoctrinate Indigenous peoples into Christianity.

Bird's section, Survival and Resilience, further explores the significance of the Pueblo and Hopi Revolt through the work of artist Jason Garcia (Santa Clara Pueblo). A pop artist and printmaker, Garcia's work bears the influence of comic book art and graphic novels. A series of Garcia's prints depicts the violent clashes between Native peoples and the Spanish Colonialists. And those tensions have reverberated through time, as the recent protests over the reenactments of Fiesta de Santa Fe, commemorating the reoccupation of Santa Fe in 1692 by Don Diego de Vargas, attest.

But Bird debated whether to display them.

"We had a discussion among my team. Some members didn't want it displayed at all because it was too graphic. We listened to everybody's arguments, pro and con. The decision was left up to me to include them or not include them. I included them. I'm probably going to get a lot of feedback both ways."

Infused in the graphic images of priests slaughtered at the hands of Pueblo warriors and Pueblo men hanged for petty crimes or who suffered amputations as punishment for resistance to Spanish rule, are signs of the lasting cultural impact of European contact in the New World, including the horse and the greyhound, which previously didn't exist in the Americas, and the introduction of silver, which is now a dominant medium in the work of Navajo jewelers.

"With this section, we're trying to inform visitors of who we are," Bird says. "We're not just Pueblo. We're not just Navajo. We speak 28 separate languages. We've been here, living on the land that the Creator placed us on."