Seeing the National Museum of the American Indian Anew as a Diplomatic Assemblage

Abstract

This essay offers a reading of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian as a diplomatic assemblage, centered on the exhibition Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations (2014–25). I elaborate on the political geographer Jason Dittmer’s theory of the diplomatic assemblage, which holds that material circulations shape international relations through a surplus emotional charge that can shift political cognition. Throughout Nation to Nation, Indigenous diplomatic arts such as wampum advance geopolitical frameworks premised on kinship and reciprocity with all aspects of a living cosmos. I argue that these arts activate a latent potential for the museum to function as a diplomatic agent in Native nations’ ongoing negotiations with the United States, despite centuries of betrayal. I also consider how the diplomatic assemblage can inform a broader interpretive ethics in the field of Native North American art.