Contemporary Native Americans will have "full complicity" in determining how their stories and those of their ancestors are told when the new National Museum of the American Indian opens on the Mall in Washington in 2002.

"Native peoples are telling their own stories," the museum’s director, Rick West, told a supportive audience Friday night at the first presentation in a lecture series sponsored by the Friends of Crow Canyon. Crow Canyon Archaeological Center is a nonprofit archaeological research and education organization headquartered west of Cortez.

West said the museum will be a national institution of living cultures from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego, designed to affirm to the native community and the non-native public the richness of American Indian history and culture.

"Indian people do have a certain authority ... that they have rarely had in museums as institutions previously," West said.

He described the evolution of the Smithsonian museum’s collection, begun by a man he called a "boxcar collector" of all things Native American. George Gustaf Heye gathered not only the types of impressive items usually attractive to collectors, including Geronimo’s Hat, Chief Joseph’s rifle case and Sitting Bull’s drum, but also "everyday native objects ... that speak volumes about Native American life and times."

Now, West said, the museum will be not just a building full of dusty archives but an institution of cultural history. He quoted former Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Robert Adams in describing how this museum "begins to correct a vast wrong and all the myths and stereotypes with which we surround it in order to hide it."

While emphasizing the need to repatriate human remains and cultural items to Native American communities, West acknowledged, "If (Heye) had not collected them then, we would not now have them to look at."

As Heye’s collection and the objects that have been acquired since are recatalogued and relocated – some to the new museum in Washington and some to other curation facilities – museum personnel will consult with Indian nations about the way in which items should be displayed and, more importantly, described.