W. Richard West Jr.’s father was taken away from his family at the age of four, placed in a boarding school where he was forced to speak English instead of his native tongue, and – in egregious violation of tradition – commanded to cut his hair.
In his lecture at the law school Tuesday night, West, who is a peace chief of the Southern Cheyenne and a citizen of the Arapaho tribe of Oklahoma, said he doesn’t feel like a victim because of his family history, but the pervasive legacy of colonialism within the native community has profoundly affected native self-image.
West said a eurocentric bias often blurs the history of the Americas before the conquests. History teachers too often ignore the architectural and cultural achievements of native people before European contact, he said.
“The impact of European contact on the native peoples were, in a word, devastating,” West said. “I am surprised constantly about what people don’t know about the American past.”
But despite all that they have been through, West said, “the native people of this hemisphere are still here. They retain a continuing resilience.”
West, the 26th Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics, who co-taught a seminar at the law school this term called “Native American Cultural Rights and Intellectual Property,” said he’s proud that native peoples have preserved their cultural heritage and endured despite great hardship. In his own tribe’s past, he said, they kept their religious and cultural ceremonies hidden in order to preserve them.
But, he said, native people haven’t remained culturally static; they’ve changed and evolved over the years adopting certain things from western culture but never assimilating. He said it’s important to not only recognize the art and culture of native people in the past but also to recognize “native peoples as a contemporary
cultural phenomenon.”
“Native peoples are experiencing a cultural renaissance,” said West. In the late 1980s West helped found the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, which, according to a press release, is committed to ensuring equal status of native cultural arts among the other arts of the world. He is currently the director of the museum’s three branches – one that opened Sept. 21 in Washington, D.C., one in Maryland and another in New York City.
West said the museum loans out artifacts all over the country in order to bring the collection to local communities, especially
native communities.
“The museum is not a palace of a collection,” he said. “The institution is about the association of the collections with people.”
Margaret Paris, dean of the School of Law, described it as, “a museum that has broken all the rules.”
The lecture, presented by the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics, was West’s last speech at the University. He is returning with his wife to their home in Washington, D.C. and will miss the University community, he said.
The center, named after former U.S. senator from Oregon Wayne Morse, is housed in the University’s school of law and, according to its Web site, brings scholars and activists to Oregon who reflect the center’s ideals of foresight, intellectual independence and integrity.