Occupying the last open space on Washington's Mall, the new National Museum of the American Indian suggests a powerful irony of American history: The people who were first on the ground are the last to be commemorated. But the new museum also carries other messages about how Americans, past and present, view that history. As passers-by can see at a glance, the museum is powerfully different from its neighbors. Architecturally, its curving sandstone walls, said to recall the famous cliff-dwellings of the Southwest, stand out radically from the would-be classical styles of Washington's other public buildings. In more senses than one, this is not a white building.

Nor is this even a museum in the traditional sense of an exhibit of things. Its designers, all of Native heritage themselves, wanted a living place, advertising living cultures, and even a site in which religious rituals can be carried out (and on federal property!). Throughout, exhibits advocate the glories of Native American societies, which -- according to one curator -- are rooted in the teachings of the ancestors who "taught us to live in harmony with animals, plants, the spirit world, and the world around us."

Link