Rick West is a southern Cheyenne Indian who was raised in a log cabin in Muskogee, Okla., and still performs sage-burning rituals in his suburban fireplace. He's also a polished Washington lawyer, lobbyist and museum director at the pinnacle of his career. He has woven the two worlds together so deftly that he is as comfortable participating in a sun dance in Wyoming as he is attending a Kennedy Center ballet.
"I do think I have a capacity for functioning at the interface between things Indian and things non-Indian," says West. He leans back on the sofa in his posh L'Enfant Plaza office, his elegant Washington power suit set off as always by snazzy black suspenders. "In a way, I think that all Indians have to do what I've done," he says. "They all have to find a way to survive at that interface, and they have to come to terms with the idea that you don't have to become a non-Indian in order to survive."
Of all the challenges West has faced, none matches that of running the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. As the museum's founding director, West, 55, led the struggle to secure a prominent plot of land -- the last available piece of real estate on the capital's most revered site, the National Mall. In 2002, a spectacular new museum will rise up alongside such national icons as the Washington Monument, the Reflecting Pool and the Lincoln Memorial.
To make it happen, West has spent eight years fund raising, fire fighting and peacemaking. He is expected to raise one-third of the project's $200 million price tag from private funds. So far, he's brought in $50 million, including a highly controversial $10 million from the Pequots, who operate a billion-dollar tribal gambling empire. The Pequot donation caused the Senate to rethink federal subsidies to Indian tribes. Meanwhile, West has had to fend off Republicans who balked at the huge federal outlay for the museum. As for the exhibits themselves, there are plenty of differences of opinion for West to mediate, about everything from how they should be presented to how provocative their message should be. And there are critics to answer, chiefly those who accuse curators of technological overkill that will create a museum with a Disneyland mentality.
But the director seems unflappable. "Rick West swims in ambiguity," says Roger Kennedy, emeritus director of the Smithsonian's Museum of American History. "There's no doubt that he was the right person for this job, because he knows how to move between different constituencies and keep all of them communicating and cooperating. His charm and his packaging are necessary in a world in which surfaces are very important."
The museum's story begins in 1980, when the Heye Foundation's Museum of the American Indian began seeking affiliation with the Smithsonian. It seemed a smart match. As the nation's foremost historical repository, the Smithsonian had long been criticized for its failure to establish a comprehensive Native American collection. For its part, the New York museum had the holdings -- everything from stone carvings by Northwest Indians to Sitting Bull's drum to a famous fringed shirt once worn by Crazy Horse -- but lacked adequate exhibition space. Its namesake, George Gustav Heye (1874-1957), was an engineer and investment banker who singlehandedly amassed the world's most expansive collection of Native American objects. But most of its 1 million items, including 86,000 photos and negatives, languished in a warehouse.By 1987, Smithsonian and Heye trustees had agreed to move the collection to Washington, D.C. As they ironed out plans, Sen. Daniel Inouye, chairman of the Senate committee on Indian affairs, and Rep. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (now a U.S. senator) introduced legislation to establish a national Native American museum. But a year later, Congress still had taken no action.
Then, billionaire Ross Perot publicly offered to move the Heye collection to Texas. It was just the jolt needed to push the Washington bureaucracy into action. Finally, on November 28, 1989, President Bush signed legislation to establish the National Museum of the American Indian as part of the Smithsonian, with a new facility to be constructed on the Mall. The bill also created two other components: a research and community center in Suitland, Md., which opens later this year, and the George Gustav Heye Center, already operating in the historic Alexander Hamilton Custom House in lower Manhattan.
All the project needed was a director. Although Rick West had no previous experience running a museum, he had something else that put him at the top of the shortlist. He knew Washington inside out, having championed Native American causes ranging from their right to operate casinos to the legitimacy of autonomous court systems on reservations. Knowing whom to approach and how, whether lobbying members of Congress or masterminding arguments that ended up in the Supreme Court, had become second nature. And he had a broad appreciation of Native American culture and concerns.
West's academic and legal background were top-drawer, too. After graduating magna cum laude from the University of Redlands in 1965, he earned a master's in history from Harvard, then entered Stanford Law School. There he met and married Mary Beth Braden, '72, now a deputy assistant secretary of state, and became a Stanford Law Review officer. Following graduation in 1971, West clerked for a year with a U.S. appeals court judge in San Francisco.
He joined the Washington offices of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson in 1972 and became a partner in 1979. When the firm closed its Native American department in 1988, West and several colleagues started their own firm in Albuquerque, N. M. The departure from the capital was short-lived. On June 1, 1990, West returned as head of the new museum.
He faced a major roadblock when Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994. "When they're looking to cut budgets on the Hill," West says, "the things that stick up like a finger on the horizon are the new construction projects." But he raised enough bipartisan support to save the fledgling museum. "One of the things I'm proudest of is that we never played the guilt card about American Indians," he says. "We kept our entire campaign positive."
When the smoke finally cleared in 1995, West had saved every dollar of the original appropriation and nailed down the last big chunk of open real estate on the Mall for the new museum, slated to break ground this year and begin receiving 6 million visitors a year in 2002. More than that, Native Americans had secured a cultural voice in Washington. "For the first time ever, Native Americans themselves are telling their history, describing their culture and doing it on their own terms -- instead of having it told for them by non-Native anthropologists or academicians."
In some ways, Rick West's hardest task lies ahead. Telling the Native American story to everyone's satisfaction will be difficult. One Sioux museum trustee calls Custer the "Eichmann of the West," but the Smithsonian will cater to Custer buffs as well. Ron Allen, president of the National Congress of American Indians, told The Washingtonian that a lot of Native Americans, seeing the nearby Holocaust Museum, will say, "Excuse us, but in this country there was a Holocaust, and we don't see anybody trying to bridge that gap and heal those wounds." Sen. Inouye notes that "the stereotype is that Indians are always asking for something. But the Indians have paid their dues, and it's about time we paid tribute to them."
West agrees -- but he is determined not to center the new museum in the past. "It's about the present, about preserving and respecting and enhancing and protecting living cultures that are going to be with us far, far into the future."
West traces his ability to straddle two worlds to his Native American father and his mother, a white Baptist minister's daughter of Scottish descent. His father grew up in federal boarding schools that were designed to erase Indian students' cultural sensibilities through militaristic discipline. He went on to study art at the University of Oklahoma and became a well-known painter and sculptor. "But he never forgot who he was," West says. "He believed that you could keep your 'Cheyenne soul' intact even if you had to do things that would allow you to function in a larger social context."The family belonged to a Baptist church, but West's father also schooled his children in Indian beliefs and taught them Indian dances -- as West has done with his own children, Amy, '96, and Benjamin, a 20-year-old student at the University of Southern California. "There was never any doubt in my mind about who I was," he says.
Today, contemplating the immense task of sorting out and somehow fairly displaying this treasure-house of Native American life and culture, West shakes his head and sends up a weary sigh. "There are going to be lots of squabbles," he predicts, "because there's no way that we'll ever be able to present more than a fragment of these artifacts in any one exhibition.
"Our task -- and it will be a mighty challenge -- will be to honor the individual, unique Native American tribes while somehow still making the entire thing comprehensible to the millions of Americans who will be visiting us each year."
For Rick West, that means finding a way to balance two worlds. Fortunately, he's used to that.
Tom Nugent is a freelance writer living in Baltimore.
