Tomahawk Missile, in Americans

The Tomahawk missile, in the exhibition called Americans. Third floor, in the big central gallery titled Indians Everywhere. The museum is free and this is the room most visitors never reach, because they come in at the ground floor, stand under the atrium, and go back out to the Mall.

Go up. There is a real Tomahawk flight test missile in that room, surrounded by baking powder tins and a baby blanket, and it is the object that makes the whole argument for you in about ten seconds.

Now take the word apart, because that is the point of standing here. Tomahawk is not an English word. It comes from tamahaac in Virginia Algonquian, the language of the Powhatan, and English speakers were writing it down by the early 1600s. Four hundred years later the United States Navy put it on a cruise missile.

Then turn around. One of the four story sections in this exhibition is Pocahontas, and Pocahontas was Powhatan. So the weapon and the woman come out of the same people and the same language, and they are in the same room, and almost nobody notices. Nobody at the Navy planned that. Notice it anyway.

Widen it out from there. The Army has named its helicopters the same way for decades. Apache. Black Hawk. Chinook. Kiowa. Lakota. Those are nations, and several of them are nations the Army fought. That is not an accident and it is not hidden. It is a choice somebody made, then made again, then kept making.

Here is the question the gallery is actually asking, and it does not answer it for you. Is this honor, or is it trophy taking. Read the labels and you will find the curators refuse to settle it. They give you the missile, the motorcycle and the tin, and they leave you holding it.

So look at what else is in here. A 1948 Indian Chief motorcycle. A Big Chief writing tablet, the kind children did homework in. A Calumet Baking Powder can from a kitchen shelf. A baby blanket in the colors of the Washington NFL team. Hundreds of objects and images, three centuries of them, all of them ordinary, all of them found in American homes and factories and armories rather than in a Native community.

The lead curator is Paul Chaat Smith, who is Comanche, and the tone of the room is his. It is funny in places, which surprises people, and then it stops being funny. Four side galleries go deep on the four stories every American thinks they already know: Thanksgiving, Pocahontas, the Trail of Tears, and Little Bighorn. Give the Little Bighorn room ten minutes if you have them. Most of what you were taught about it is in there being taken apart carefully.

Two practical things. Come up here before you eat, not after, because the cafe on the ground floor is the best food on the Mall and people go in and never come out with the energy for a third floor. And bring somebody with you. This is not a looking room, it is an arguing room, and it does not do much for a person walking through it alone with a phone.