Almost 20 years after the late Sen. Daniel Inouye presided over the opening of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, the institution he helped create remembered him.

At an event designating the museum’s Director’s Terrace in his name, museum director Kevin Gover noted that Inouye had introduced the Senate bill establishing the museum.

Gover at the ceremony recealled that three key experiences had moved Inouye to write the bill.

“One was his realization that in this city of monuments, not a single statue or marker honored the First Americans,” Gover said.  “He was then overwhelmed by the sheer quantity – over 800,000 items – of Indian cultural materials amassed by a certain 20th Century private collector containing everything from Peruvian gold to the standard of Sitting Bull, and was distressed by the fact that the collection was deteriorating. 

“And finally,” Gover said, “he saw the neatly arranged boxes containing over 18,500 Native American human remains taken from battlefields and desecrated graves that had come into the possession that the Smithsonian Institution.  He remarked, ‘Here, long after the end of the Indian wars, the First people of our land were still being maligned and mistreated, and like any other American, my reaction was that something had to be done.’ “

Gover said Inouye, who served on the museum’s Board of Trustees from 2001 to 2006, accomplished more during his tenure as chairman or vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. He cited  the Native American Graves Protection & Repatriation Act, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, the Native Hawaiian Education Act, the Native Hawaiian Health Care Improvement Act, the Indian Health Care Improvement Act.

“It is fair to say that no single person in government has done more for American Indians in the past three decades—indeed, perhaps ever—than Senator Inouye,” Gover said. “He was a champion acting for the best of reasons: he simply believed it was the right thing to do.”

— Kery Murakami