W. Richard West Jr., founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, will speak tonight
about the cultural presence of native people in modern society.
West, a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, is the University’s 2006-07 recipient of the Wayne Morse Chair, which is awarded to exceptional individuals “who have raised the level of public awareness of such important issues as human rights and social justice,” according to the University Center of Law and Politics’ Web site.
“Native people are a continuing cultural phenomenon, not a past phenomenon,” West said, explaining that the present existence of native cultures throughout the Americas often is being ignored in society and in the classroom.
Our country’s ability to face ethnic diversity is struggling, and the solution requires creating more active discussion on ethnicity today, rather than education rehabilitation tomorrow,
West said.
“When I was growing up in Oklahoma, native peoples were absent in any kind of treatment in what I was learning about in school,” West said.
The National Museum of the American Indian opened its new building Sept. 21, in Washington, D.C., and attracted 25,000
to 30,000 native peoples, something West described as “a resounding affirmation of all the Americas.”
The museum is a tool with which native people can teach each other, and the rest of society, that they are groups of living people and not only a part of history, West said.
“We don’t always have to be talked about by someone else,” West said. “We are capable.”
The newest building is only one of three; the others are located in New York and Maryland and represent 35 to 40 million native peoples throughout the Western Hemisphere and Hawaii, 1,000 to 5,000 of which are in existence today, West said.
“In reality, it really is an international institution of living cultures,” West said about the museum.
West is using his experiences as a lawyer, lobbyist and Peace Chief of the Southern Cheyenne to teach a course at the University Law School this September and early
October, on Native American cultural and intellectual property rights with his childhood friend and University Law Professor,
Rennard Strickland. The lecture, titled “Native America in the 21st Century: Out of the Mists and Beyond Myth,” is to be held at the Knight Law Center, room 175, at 7 p.m. tonight.
West is the 26th recipient of the Wayne MorseChair; last year’s chair holder was Wilma Mankiller, the first female deputy chief of the Cherokee Nation.
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