Almost 30 years later, Lowe, the new chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, still has similar experiences. In late 2019, just months before the coronavirus shut down much of society, Lowe — who was then executive director of the Harvard University Native American Program — was approached by a woman after giving remarks at an event at Harvard’s Peabody Museum.
“She said, ‘I didn’t know there were Native American people in this country,’ ” Lowe, a member of the Navajo Nation, recalled last week. “I get that comment all the time.”
