Oct. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Like everything else these days, museums are mostly about money, so it's no surprise that when you enter the Smithsonian Institution's new National Museum of the American Indian, which opened Sept. 21 in Washington, D.C., you walk through a cavernous domed atrium that looks as if it were designed to be the sumptuous setting for candle-lit fund-raisers. You can almost hear the clink of high-ball glasses and the jing-a- ling of jewelry.

No, wait. That jing-a-ling of jewelry must be coming from just beyond the atrium, where the Chesapeake Museum Store sells bracelets and earrings and necklaces of silver and jade for $950 and up. The Chesapeake store is not to be confused with the Roanoke Museum Store, which is on the mezzanine above.

Follow the path past the Chesapeake store, past the Mitsitam restaurant (Piscataway for ``Let's eat''), and you'll find an ATM, right next to the elevators. And not a moment too soon, either. Lunch at the Mitsitam can easily run $20 or more per head.

By this time, having circumnavigated the entire first floor of the museum, one of the largest on the national mall, you still won't have seen a single museum exhibit; all the exhibits are far above you, on the third and fourth floor, an elevator ride away. But you will have had multiple opportunities to spend money.

The Last Museum

In fairness, it must be said that the National Museum of the American Indian was not designed solely to accommodate the new national pastime of shopping. It is also intended to make a political and sociological statement --though not a terribly coherent one.

Its opening last month sparked headlines around the U.S., for good reason. The building itself is a spectacular creation of curving limestone walls, surrounded by rock gardens and waterfalls and exotic plantings. Filling the last open site on the national mall, in the heart of the nation's capital, it will be the final addition to perhaps the greatest concentration of museum space in the world, anchored by the National Museum of American History and the National Gallery.

Inside, however, it bears little resemblance to those more traditional neighbors, which exist to display artifacts notable for their beauty or cultural significance as a way of elevating or amusing the customers.

The Indian Louvre

The National Museum of the American Indian, in contrast, aims not to elevate or amuse but to lecture.

It didn't have to be this way. The museum's nucleus is the world's largest collection of American Indian artifacts, amassed by George Gustav Heye, a New York investment banker, before his death in 1957. Some scholars have declared Heye's collection, in its variety and excellence, to be the Indian equivalent of the Hermitage or the Louvre.

The Heye museum in Manhattan was always too small for its founder's collection, which is one reason Congress in 1989 authorized the construction of the new museum.

Yet today only a small fraction of the Heye works can be seen on the mall. The rest -- including pieces of surpassing beauty and historical interest, such as Sitting Bull's pictographic autobiography -- have been trucked to a warehouse in Suitland, Maryland, where they sit unseen by the general public.

High Concept

Instead, once you make it to the upper floors and wander the museum's high-concept exhibits -- ``Our Universes,'' ``Our Peoples,'' ``Our Lives'' -- you find a jumble of displays designed to reflect the lives Indians lead today, giving off an unmistakable air of ethnic boosterism. Almost all the exhibits have been designed by native peoples themselves, with a minimum of curatorial oversight, and it shows.

Thus in the middle of one space sits a 1950s Bombardier snow bus, used by Metis Indians for snow-fishing. Another display shows a front door taken from an Indian community center in downtown Chicago. One entire case is devoted to an annual Indian singing and dance competition -- held in Denver every spring since 1973. The ``artifacts'' here are a stack of bumper stickers, a plastic cup from a concession stand, and a jean jacket stamped ``Denver March Pow Wow 2004.''

The banality reaches its lowest point with the inevitable inclusion of a pile of slot machine tokens from an Indian casino in Connecticut.

Two Tragedies

At a press preview last month, W. Richard West Jr., the museum's director who is himself of Indian descent, was asked how he would summarize the museum's message.

``It says, `We're still here,''' he said. ``It's the story of Native Americans today, told from the inside out.''

Indian tribes, he said, were unanimous in insisting the museum not depict them as a ``historic relic.''

Fair enough. The near-total destruction of the continent's pre-Columbian cultures is one of the two great tragedies of U.S. history -- slavery, of course, being the other -- and you can't blame the survivors for not wanting to dwell on it.

Yet by refusing to give more space to Heye's superb collection, replacing it instead with the uninteresting bric-a- brac of contemporary life, the museum ill-serves those original cultures. Worse, it suggests that the proper attitude to the past is to ignore it.

The experience is enough to make a visitor glum. And when an American gets glum, there's only one thing for him to do: Shop. Luckily, he'll be in the right place.

To contact the writer of this column: Andrew Ferguson in Washington aferguson62@yahoo.com .