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Content provided by the American Bar Association Division for Public Education. Visit the Division for Public Education's website to learn more about the law and its role in society (www.abanet.org/publiced). For more profiles of pioneers in the legal profession, visit the Division for Public Education's Raising the Bar: Pioneers in the Legal Profession website at www.abanet.org/publiced/raisingthebar.html.
W. Richard West
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Lawyer W. Richard West has had an illustrious and varied career. He is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma and has devoted much of his professional and personal life to working with American Indians on legal, cultural and educational issues. West worked as a lawyer for more than fifteen years before becoming the founding director of the National Museum of the American Indian. West was born in San Bernardino, California on January 6, 1943, and grew up in Muskogee, Oklahoma. His father was Walter Richard West Sr., the Cheyenne master artist; his mother a music lover of Scottish ancestry. His father told West and his brother, "You are Cheyenne, and don't you ever forget that," and West says he feels a "bona-fide rootedness [in Cheyenne culture] that centers me." West's father also warned his sons that they would need higher education to succeed in the world. "We were pushed as fast as our little minds would run," West says. "I think we have six or seven degrees between us." West attended the University of Redlands in California, graduating magna cum laude in 1965, as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He received a master's degree in American history from Harvard University in 1968, but decided to go on to law school because he felt he could have "more direct impact as an attorney than...as a college professor." He graduated from Stanford Law School with a J.D in 1971, winning the Hilmer Oelmann Jr. Prize for excellence in legal writing. West also served as an officer of the Stanford Law Review. After graduating, West worked on American Indian-related cases as an attorney at the Washington, D.C. firm office of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson. He became a partner in the firm in 1979 and stayed until 1988, at which point he left to co-found the American Indian-owned Albuquerque law firm of Gover, Stetson, Williams and West, P.C. There he served as general counsel and special counsel to numerous Indian tribes and organizations. In that capacity, he represented clients before federal, state, and tribal courts, as well as at various executive departments of the federal government and Congress. West also kept up his interests in Indian history and culture, and in 1989 became involved in the efforts to create the National Museum of the American Indian. He served five years as coordinator and treasurer of the Native American Council of Regents of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, gaining valuable insights into the contemporary Indian art world. In 1990, West was named as the founding director of the National Museum of the American Indian. The Museum is a part of the Smithsonian Institution, and includes over 800,000 objects from the Heye collection. West says of the Museum, "One of our most serious commitments at the National Museum of the American Indian is to offer a counterbalance to the distortions engendered by the painfully long exclusion of Indian people from the interpretation of their own history and culture." As director, West has been responsible for guiding the successful opening of the three facilities that comprise the Museum: the George Gustav Heye Center, which opened in New York City in 1994; the Cultural Resources Center, which opened in Suitland, Maryland in 2000; and the Mall Museum, which is scheduled to open on the last available site on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in 2004. West has also played a key role in guiding the philosophy of the "Fourth Museum," a community outreach program giving millions of people worldwide the opportunity to experience the Museum's collections, photo archives, exhibitions and public programs. West's skills-as a lawyer, lobbyist, historian, and fundraiser-have been tried and tested in the years he has worked as Museum Director. He has weathered difficult moments in the museum planning process, such as the firing of the original architect consortium for the Mall Museum in 1998, and has had to balance a number of competing interests. But his cultural ambidexterity has seen him through. Roger Kennedy, retired director of the National Park Service and a member of the search committee that chose West to head NMAI, says he admires West's "astonishing capacity... to maintain his balance between the buffeting and brevity of focus of the contemporary world and a steady commitment to enduring values derived from his own essential culture." West is married to the former Mary Beth Braden, who is an attorney and ambassador with the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C. They have two children, Amy and Ben. Source: Julia Klein, "Alumni: At the Interface," Harvard Magazine, 11 April 2003. (Originally published in 2003) |
