ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how visitors experience the symbolic and material dimensions of spaces such as museums. In traveling to Cody and to the Plains Indian Museum (PIM), then, visitors are embedded in an experiential landscape of immensity and sublimity. PIM located at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming. These "natural" spaces, in their overwhelming vastness and position visitors to look in particular ways. They construct a reverent eye/I, for it is precisely the "sense that there is something larger than a human being, accompanied by capacities for awe, respect" that defines the virtue of reverence. By the time one arrives at the PIM, one has been trained to look reverently—to look with respect from a distance. Visitors are invited by the absence of technological sophistication to disengage from this (non)exhibit; and, in ignoring this exhibit, visitors may also ignore the history. By providing the barest acknowledgment of conquest in least interesting way, the wall privileges forgetting over remembering.
