Dear American Museum of Natural History...

You're on my shit-list.

You would think that America's largest, oldest, and best-funded museum dedicated to natural history would be quite the fun place to visit. A trip to Chicago's Field Museum should theoretically give you some idea of what the AMNH should be like: informative exhibits, interesting, visually appealing displays, and up-to-date information displayed using the most current exhibition techniques. But you would be wrong.

We and the AMNH didn't get off to the best start. Guarding the building's front entrance is a tall bronze equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt, one of the museum's greatest supporters, flanked by an loincloth-clad African and a Native American. I don't think I need to explain the racist overtones of the sculpture. When we entered and went to the front desk, the employees had never even heard of the Field Museum ("It's another natural history museum, about as famous and large as this one") and then they didn't even let us in free. In fact they ended up charging me extra for a special exhibit, meaning I only got in for a standard student rate ($16.00). Already peeved, Shewara and I went to exploring the place. The collection seemed extensive: gems and geology, space and astronomy, and exhibits on every cultural group outside of Europe. This last part should ring some bells: the "primitive" peoples of the world were fit to be displayed as "natural" history, while civilized society was not. This idea has taken something of a firm hold in the public museum-going consciousness (even the Field Museum functions in this way), but most other institutions make up for it with the way the exhibits are constructed. The AMNH exhibits were constructed in such a way as to turn every continent in the world int a homogenous blob of disorganized people who had little better to do than create "ritual objects," "fetishes (a terribly offensive term for a sacred figure or mask that I thought had been out of use since the 1950s)," and do "ceremonial dances." Any sort of cultural differentiation, context, or explanation of the purpose, or even local name, of any object was almost impossible to find. For example, there was a glass display case of ten wooden figures labeled "Ritual Figures of Central Africa" None had an explanation or cultural group on the label. They didn't even have labels. What was interesting about this fact was one of the figures I knew for a fact to be a royal portrait of the greatest king of the Kuba Kingdom in central Congo, a very wealthy and powerfyl empire that in its heyday could battle any contemporary kingdom in Europe. The man in that figure was as influtential, famous, and powerful in central Africa as Louis XIV was in western Europe. And he gets "ritual statue." Give me a break.

I could go on about how crappy the people seemed (first the ticket counter, then the giftshop people who, when I asked them a question in English, discussed it with each other in Spanish. I responded to them. En Espanol.) I could go on about the shag carpeting and ridiculous steup of the geology exhibit, the fact that the astronomy exhibit actually made me dumber while boring me out of my mind, and that if they ever put a group of beautifully carved, in my opinion breathtaking, Northwest Coast statues together again in a dark corner and label them all "statue" I am going to be forced to take away someone's Ph.D. Because seriously. So, AMNH, go get that money you have, take a trip to the Field Museum, and learn how to create some displays so you don't turn New York's future leaders into a but of culturally and scientifically illiterate pea-brains by the time they're 18.

Thanks.