For as memorable as the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit was, I am absolutely haunted by something else which I saw at the Milwaukee Public Museum right afterwards. As you leave the scrolls exhibit, you walk right past something which is called “Indian Country” – which features 37 life-size models dressed in spectacular Native American costume which move about on an intricate carousel. It’s meant to depict a powwow grand entry ceremony, involving Indians from the Chippewa, Menominee, Oneida, Potawatomi and Winnebago tribes. This display has been up for many years and Kathy for one vividly remembers seeing it when she was a kid. I’d seen it, too, a number of times, but I had never done much more than glance at it. (I’m embarrassed to say that I have never been particularly interested in Native Americans or their rich history – or at least not nearly as interested as I should be.)
This time, with my wife running off to the restroom, I found myself really looking closely at these colorful figures. . . and what I noticed almost immediately was how incredibly lifelike these figures are. To be more precise: they don’t look alive, but they very much look like they once were alive. For me, it brought to mind a very creepy episode of the Twilight Zone in which the mannequins in a department store are granted brief reprieves where they become fully alive human beings only to be forced to return to their “lives” as mannequins. The episode climaxes with a certain cute blonde woman only very reluctantly agreeing to resume her previous existence, and the last image we see is of a blonde mannequin with an astonishing resemblance to the actress we’ve been watching until then. That’s what these Native American figures looked like to me- like they had once been alive, but now were condemned to this artificial existence of “dancing” on this slowly revolving carousel for years on end.
This reaction of mine is a tribute not only to whoever designed and built these remarkable models – but also a tribute to human imagination. . . something I hadn’t thought about in a long long time. I stood there transfixed by these figures for I don’t know how long, and as I continued to look at them, they became more convincingly real rather than less. (I think one reason these figures seemed especially real was because of the expression on each face – a look of seriousness which in fact looked almost more like sadness and resignation.) It was as though I could fully imagine each of these figures as fully and vibrantly alive human beings who had somehow been transformed into these convincing models – and very much against their wishes. I don’t know exactly what it is about the human mind that allows us to do this, but it may be the one thing that most emphatically separates us from the aardvarks and orangutans….. our imagination. And although I should not have been surprised to have my own imagination so potently primed in a museum, I never would have imagined that it would happen as powerfully as it did and because of this decades-old display that at a glance doesn’t seem like anything remarkable.
But trust me. . .it is. You just have to look a little more closely and carefully.