This article interrogates the politics of representation, expectation, and responsibility at the new National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington, DC. The authors explore the interpretive contests (between and among Natives and non-Natives) provoked by the museum's representational strategies. They think that NMAI has positioned itself as a center for unabashed, unflinching debate about politics of representing Native peoples. Given the intractably complex dialogues between its published mission and the wildly competing expectations of its visitors and reviewers, what the authors found most gratifying is the museum's open invitation for "skepticism", "exploration", "encounter", "reflection", and "argument". Flushing out some of these complexities, they point to the culturally contingent bases of visitor's disappointments, confusions, and pleasures. The authors suggest that the NMAI pushes visitors to take responsibility for the familiarity and ignorance (and often these are part of the same interpretive package) that they bring through the doors of the NMAI. The power-laden politics of recognition, identity, and narration--as played out in the cross-cultural and intracultural exchanges at work in the museum--are shown to be fundamental to any interpretive possibility. They see NMAI as a space created in deeply admirable, almost manic self-reflection. (Contains 3 figures and 27 notes.)