Paul Chaat Smith > Quotes

“The preposterous, wonderful, and breathtakingly ambitious project known officially as the National Museum of the American Indian (NAMI) seeks to tell a new kind of history, a new way, yet it too has a history like all others. And like the others its reading is incomplete without knowing how and when it came together, the conventional wisdom of the age, the furious debates the historians engaged in or avoided, who collected the pieces and assembled them, the name of the person who wrote the first drafts and the final edits, who paid for it and why, where the missing footnotes and excised chapters are kept (if they were kept). In other words, no history is complete without the history of the history.”
― Paul Chaat Smith, Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong

“Nixon may have cared nothing for Indians himself. Yet Indians cared about him. Today his administration is widely regarded as one of the most pro-Indian of the twentieth century, one that reversed the hated termination of federal reservations and restored Indian lands to tribes, and ushered in a new era of self-determination.”
― Paul Chaat Smith, Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong