The National Museum of the American Indian opened on September 21, 2004. It cost 220 million dollars. Half of that was raised from private donations, and the other half came from taxpayers. Given its placement on the National Mall near the Smithsonian and the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and its religious assignment – to help heal the wounds created by mistreatment of Native Americans – the NMAI received a lot of attention.

I've been to some great museums. The greats in New York, of course, that every area kid goes to: The Museum of Natural History, the Met, the Frick, the Guggenheim, The Bronx Zoo, not a museum, but like one in its education and inspiration of the public through displays. I worked as a zookeeper there for one summer. In Europe I visited the Museum of the Tropics in Amsterdam, the Louvre, the British Museum. From all of Greece what I remember most is "Nike Adjusting her Sandal." While traveling around the Mediterranean, all the World Travelers tell you to go to the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv. They'll tell you, "There is nothing expensive or famous there. It's just how they've done it. You have to see it." And, as ever, the World Travelers were correct. Bethlehem was a painful letdown. I'd advise tourists not to go. But they must go to Tel Aviv's Diaspora Museum!

The entire city of Florence. Michelangelo's David. I spent hours and hours. I couldn't stop gaining new things from gazing at David. Caravaggio's "On the Road to Damascus," Michelangelo's "Moses:" you witness these, ostensibly inanimate, and it changes your life.

In other words, a good museum is a good museum.

The backstory of the National Museum of the American Indian is cataclysmic. Europeans arrived in the New World in 1492, bringing with them Old World diseases and overwhelming technological power. The Native Americans, lacking metal weapons, horses, the wheel, and immunological resistance, were no match. No one can ever know the exact numbers, but some estimate that diseases like small pox and measles decreased the entire pre-contact population of Native Americans by ninety percent within the first 150 years after Columbus landed. ...