In this article, Avner Segall explores some pedagogical processes in the context of two museums in Washington, DC, that focus on difficult knowledge, the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In doing so, Segall's aim is not to explore the museums as a whole or provide a comprehensive examination of each museum's full array of exhibit halls; nor to criticize these museums; but to explore the ways in which particular elements in the two museums illustrate two very different approaches to an encounter with difficult knowledge. Of specific interest to the author is the degree and ways in which the "difficult knowledge" presented in these two museums--one pertaining to the Holocaust, the other about the consequences of the Columbian Exchange on Native Americans--is portrayed and, subsequently, the particular ways in which this exposure acts educationally to invite visitors to know some things and to avoid others.