, The New York Times, October 27, 2023; What Is a Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library Doing in North Dakota?
"The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, set to open on July 4, 2026, will pay tribute to the 26th president’s “relentless, resilient spirit” and environmental vision. Perched dramatically on a butte, it aims to be “a people’s presidential library,” rooted not in books and archives — there are none — but immersive exhibits that challenge visitors to get, as Roosevelt famously put it, “in the arena.”...
More than a century after his death, Roosevelt remains one of the most popular presidents, celebrated as a man of action, a muscular nationalist, an environmental visionary, a trustbuster or all of the above. He’s a favorite of Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley, Tom Brady and LeBron James. Historians consistently rank him among the top five.
But Roosevelt also saw life as a struggle between the weak and the strong, with whites at the top of the evolutionary heap. Which raises another, thornier question: How do you build an honest 21st-century museum about a figure whose 19th-century attitudes about race, empire and, especially, Native Americans still trail him like a cloud of dust?...
“The library is the landscape,” Edward F. O’Keefe, the project’s chief executive, said on a visit to the site last month. It’s a mantra cited often here, along with the library’s core values: “dare greatly, think boldly, care deeply and live passionately.”...
Snohetta has also designed major libraries in Calgary and in Alexandria, Egypt. “Libraries aren’t just about books and buildings,” Dykers said, “but also about places, and learning about those places directly.”...
Scott Davis, a former executive director of the North Dakota Indian Affairs Commission, said he immediately texted Governor Burgum when he saw the news. “I was really upset,” he recalled in an interview last month in Medora. After a long conversation, Davis said, the governor raised the possibility of adding a “platform” for Native voices at the library...
A two-page spread in the library’s “Story Guide” lists “sensitive issues,” including Roosevelt’s support for eugenics, his militarism and his often “coarse and fearful” views of Native Americans.
“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians,” he said in 1886, “but I believe nine out of every 10 are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”"
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