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September 20th 2006 • Printer version Director of the National Museum of the American Indian to speak 
W. Richard West, Jr. will lecture at the University of Oregon on the
Native American cultural experience. He is the director of the National
Museum of the American Indian, the most recent addition to the
Smithsonian museums on the Washington D.C. Mall.
The free public lecture, "Native America in
the 21st Century: Out of the Mists and Beyond Myth," will take place at
7:00 P.M on Tuesday, October 3 in the auditorium (Room 175) of the
Knight Law Center at 15th Avenue and Agate Street in Eugene.
West's lecture will explore the complexity, breadth, and depth of
the Native American cultural experience before European contact to the present. In
a 2005 interview in American Indian Quarterly, West said "The museum is
about living cultures, [we] assumed from the very beginning that we
were talking about an immense time span . . .from the far distant past
through the present and into the future. There are thirty to forty
million Indigenous people in this hemisphere. The museum had to be
about them too, not just our ancestors or ancient cultural
patrimony."
West is a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma and a peace chief of the Southern Cheyenne.
He is also an attorney who has devoted his professional life to
working with American Indians on cultural, educational, legal, and governmental
issues. Mary
Beth West, a distinguished international
 environmental lawyer,
accompanied her husband
to Eugene. Although her visit is a private one,
she has been working with Ocean and Coastal Law Center director Richard Hildreth
and lectured to the law faculty in September on
"Lawyers as Problem
Solvers in a Globalized World.
Mary Beth West has negotiated a number of
agreements on fisheries and international trade.
She
retired from the U.S. State Department in 2005 after holding a series
of high level positions at the rank of ambassador, including deputy
assistant secretary for oceans and fisheries. West lectures and
publishes on ocean law, alternative dispute resolution, Indian law and international
law.
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