The Facade of Education and Representation: Impressions of the American Natural History Museum
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A land of all beings — monkeys, dinosaurs, whales, penguins, neanderthals — a place we can witness, observe, and immerse in Earth’s past and present, transporting ourselves to anywhere in the world. Sounds pretty great for only $20. Welcome to the American Museum of Natural History, founded in 1869 in NYC.
This past week I was in the area and decided to stop for a visit. I was super excited to visit a renowned museum containing an extensive collection of natural artifacts. I was even more excited when I realized that as a student residing in New York State, I could pay what I could (which was certainly less than the $20+ price tag).
Going in, I had high expectations. I have been to natural history museums across the world — Taiwan, Pakistan, and living museums (aka the wild) in Madagascar and India. All displays were impressive in their own right, depicting local flora, fauna, rocks, and minerals.
Knowing the US and our capitalistic and colonial mindsets, I knew the American Natural History Museum would go the extra mile in collecting specimens beyond US boundaries. Of course, my guess was right.
Upon entering, I was impressed by the interactive displays for the solar system and insect life. There were live ants crawling up plants carrying leaves. There were preserved insects of all shapes and sizes — bigger than my hand for some of them (I tried my best to trade my yuck reaction for curiosity). Not knowing much about insects besides their impressive diversity, I moved into the next section: Biodiversity.
The biodiversity room was my personal favorite. A jungle atmosphere and dim lighting created a daring atmosphere, begging us to wonder what all the creatures hanging around us are. Here, we enter the taxidermy. There were real sea turtles, Siberian tigers, horseshoe crabs, giant crabs, octopuses, lemurs, sea sponges, corals, and more. All of these creatures decorated a wall and center display. The design was stunning in its own right but lacked proper labeling of each species for the viewer. While I wanted to know the name of every animal that now displays their preserved body, I got no more information than their visual appearance and arbitrary placement. Why sea sponges were adjacent to monkeys, I am not sure. Quite unfortunate.
My mind began to wander, questioning how these creatures were obtained. There were perfectly preserved conch shells larger than my abdomen. Shells are extremely hard to obtain perfectly; any washed-up shell has been eroded continuously by salt water and pushed across rocks and sand. Most are damaged in some way, shape, or form. Finding a perfect shell requires either constant beach monitoring in tropical regions (where Western explorers typically exploited indigenous people) or fish where the animals that make and inhabit these shells are killed.
In Madagascar, I witnessed the shell trade for myself. The animals are fished for their shells and left to die out of water. Their bodies, as far as I am aware, are not used — especially not for the Western audiences who crave their VSCO girl shell necklaces.
My mind continued wandering as I entered the Native American room. This room is extravagant. Skyscraper-tall ceilings filled with totem poles higher than I ever imagined. A canoe the size of a humpback whale mounted from the ceiling. I was awestruck. For a speed history lesson, the United States colonizers completely destroyed Native American life. Disease took out the first many. The Trail of Tears forced natives off of their homes. Boarding schools (assimilation schools) ripped natives of whatever cultural roots they had left… The list goes on. Now here is a display of Native American artifacts that I can bet were not all obtained fairly. Many Native American objects are stolen goods eventually ending up in museums’ hands one sketchy way or another. Returning the objects to their rightful owners is often far out of a museum’s question. As my colleague says, “No museum is innocent.”
It does seem like the American Museum of Natural History is putting some effort into educating people on Native American culture and more importantly, rights. They acknowledge that American citizens need to shift the narrative of thinking of Natives as “others” living on some reserve “out there” and recognize that we American citizens of non-native descent are living on countless miles of stolen land. That being said, I still demand more.
While Natives have received a lot of media attention over land and object rights, that doesn’t mean the museum should only address the issues where the media is looking. The museum should also take responsibility for how they obtained many other objects. Many taxidermy animals were killed purely for the purpose of display. While it seems nice to believe the animals died naturally in the wild or even in a zoo, this is often not the case. Additionally, trying to obtain these animals may lead to other consequential deaths. Species that live in groups may defend one another, resulting in the death of many all for the display of one.
The majority of the taxidermy animals I observed in the museum either had no tags of how the animal was obtained or a short message that it was a donated “gift” by a particular person or group. While this does give us viewers a lead for further research, it adds an extra layer before the full truth is revealed. I would have to write down the name (already inconvenient as a moving viewer in a museum), go home to look it up and dig deep into this person’s relations with the animal in hopes of finding some evidence of how the animal died.
Of course, these darker truths are hidden; they don’t sell particularly well. Yet, it still saddens me that business trumps transparency.
My next point of contention is with the display of international people. In attempts to display the token cultures, the museum dilutes each country and its people. Firstly, the region feels like an outdated second-thought exhibit. The ceilings are low, wall finishes are cheap and nothing about it brings a particular wow factor. At least in the Native American room, my socks were knocked off. Here, my socks were tight around my ankles as I walked quickly through these exhibits. Secondly, the displays, in my opinion, work to exoticize people abroad. Yes, some people do wear fur pelts and masks and ornately embroidered pieces but this overgeneralizes the population. Many people dress just like any other American — jeans, blouse, t-shirt. I cannot help but wonder about the implications of such overemphasis on the oriental image (and such a half-done display of such). Will students walking through these exhibits assume these people are “other” and reinforce the idea of linear progress and modernization? Newsflash, the West is not “more advanced” it just has different ways of solving different problems. Progress is not linear. It’s a cyclical journey.
The way each glass pane quickly touches a new group with little time to transition also inappropriately clumps regions together. While exhibits A to D do fall within the present-day definition of “Asia,” that does not make East Asia remotely similar to West Asia nor does it make countries in East Asia the same. I fear rushing through such regions implies this. The way we define continents is 100% arbitrary. There are no geographic boundaries that suggest Europe should be distinct from Asia, for example. Land-wise, Europe is quite insignificant and could easily join with another land mass. The current argument is not for a museum alone to address; it is a global issue. That being said, there can be more effort than a failed facade of Japanese architecture to indicate the diversity and similarities of people we may encounter on this planet.
I am also generally unsure about why we put African, Asian, and Native (North and South) American people in a natural history museum. Maybe I’m incorrect here, but I associate a natural history museum with flora and fauna that are nonhuman besides the discussion of human evolution. Discussing different ethnic dress is not really a natural history, but a cultural history. I hope people do not associate the displayed cultures as more animalistic (and consequently inferior) to the not-included European cultures. For real though, why is there no European room? The exclusion of such a group reinforces these “other-ing” concepts for the people that are included in the museum. Europeans are not to be associated with the natural diversity of the world. Somehow Europeans are in a different category all on their own.
On a much lighter note, there is also inaccurate information being shared. In the primate room, they write that there is only one species of orangutan. It has been well-known for quite some time that there are two distinct species found in Borneo and Sumatra. In 2017, a third species was discovered as well. For chimpanzees, they also affirm there is one species. There are two species: the chimpanzee we all know and the smaller bonobo (previously called the pygmy chimpanzee). Chimpanzees receive so much public attention for them being our closest living relative, but bonobos are just as similar and are forgotten more than any other ape species. Any primatologist can tell you these common ape facts. Where were these primatologists when designing and updating these displays?
Finally, I believe this museum is just too big. There are too many rooms to see that it is easy to skip past the educational written materials. The museum becomes no more than a still-life zoo when there is so much to see and not enough time to ingest it fully. Some exhibits should certainly be kept in other museums or redone to better display the subjects. Rather than shoot for quantity over quality, the museum could fare so much better by directing resources to a smaller exhibition space. Some spaces, like the insect room, are really quite marvelous, but the transition between rooms, outdated human sections, and incorrect facts has really allowed this museum to fall short as an academic institution.
I once saw museums as a place for public access to information and education. This one is more like a mockery of that.
