"Please do not touch," a sign you are likely to see at a museum exhibition near priceless paintings and icons, also should double these days as a message to Congress. Another exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution has been buffeted by political winds. This time a photography exhibition featuring the pristine beauty of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was revised to make it less promotional of preservation.
Subhankar Banerjee from Calcutta, India, spent 14 months photographing the four seasons of ANWR, a nearly 20-million-acre preserve situated in northern Alaska. Through the pure honesty of a camera lens, his book disputes the depictions offered by pro-oil-drilling members of Congress who insist no wildlife exists in ANWR most of the year. Banerjee's pictures feature the migrations of caribou and birds during the warmer months as well as the animated life of other animals during the Arctic's brutal winter.
Following the March Senate debate on oil exploration in ANWR, where the Bush administration's prodrilling position was defeated 52 to 48, a scheduled exhibition featuring Banerjee's photographs at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History was sharply revised. Though the institution claims the changes were not the result of political pressure, Banerjee and his book publisher say they were told otherwise by Smithsonian officials.
The exhibit that opened on May 1 was moved from the main floor rotunda to a far less conspicuous place on a lower level, and photo captions were rewritten. For example, a caption that originally offered a quote from Banerjee saying, "The refuge has the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen and is so remote and untamed that many peaks, valleys and lakes are still without names," now reads: "Unnamed Peak, Romanzof Mountains."
In recent years a handful of exhibits at the Smithsonian have been at the center of political storms, most famously the National Air and Space Museum's planned exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. Veterans and congressional representatives saw the display as too critical of America's actions and the uproar caused the museum to shelve most of the exhibit except the bomber Enola Gay.
When history is rewritten or distorted to make us feel better, we are collectively diminished. The Smithsonian's mission is to offer the truth, not something contrived for political advantage or dressed up to comport with popular opinion. By subjecting Smithsonian exhibitions to political pressure, Congress is damaging the credibility and reputation of one of the finest institutions of research and learning in the world. Why is it the Republicans in Congress can't seem to keep their hands off our national treasures?
