Crossing worlds: hide coats, relationships, and identity in Rupert’s land and Britain
January 2021
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Chapter
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Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America
Across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, material culture played key roles in the expansion of trade networks, empires, colonial regimes, and the lives of ordinary people caught up in these processes.Two extraordinary nineteenth-century moose hide coats, which are decorated with painted designs and porcupine quillwork and which combine various aspects of European and broader global fashion and Indigenous technology and cultural perspectives, form the focus of this chapter.
FFR, cross-cultural history, Metis, colonial history, indigenous material culture
TEACHING ANTHROPOLOGY WITH MUSEUM COLLECTIONS
February 2020
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Journal article
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Teaching Anthropology
<jats:p>Material culture provides powerful teaching opportunities for core anthropological themes and issues. Based on experience in teaching both undergraduate and postgraduate students, teh authors provide examples and a framework for a class exercise which supports students to learn from objects and to think anthropologically about them.</jats:p>
Decolonization as a Permanent Process: PRM Relations with the Haida Nation, 1998-2018
January 2019
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Journal article
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Decolonizing the Museum in Practice: Papers from Annual Conference of the Museum Ethnographers Group Held at the Pitt Rivers Museum 12–13 April 2018
Museums and Source Communities: Reflections and implications
January 2019
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Chapter
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Matters of Belonging: ethnographic museums in a changing Europe
The great box and its child: What happens when museum objects go home?
March 2018
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Journal article
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Journal of Museum Ethnography
One of the real questions that all museum ethnographers have is: what happens if an important heritage item is restored in some way to a community of origin? There is often a great deal of tension around the repatriation process itself, and our attention is drawn to repatriation processes, but what happens afterwards, to the object, and to relationships around it?
Introduction: Repatriation and ritual, repatriation as ritual
July 2017
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Journal article
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Museum Worlds
This special section of Museum Worlds explores the entire process of repatriation as a set of rituals enacted by claimants and museum staff: a set of highlighted performances enacting multiple sets of cosmological beliefs, symbolic systems, and political structures. Some of the rituals of repatriation occur within the space of Indigenous ceremonies; others happen within the museum spaces of collections storage and the boardroom; others, such as handover ceremonies, are coproduced and culturally hybrid. From the often obsessive bureaucracy associated with repatriation claims to the affective moment of handover, repatriation articulates a moral landscape where memory, responsibility, guilt, identity, sanctity, place, and ownership are given a ritual form. Theory about ritual is used here to situate the articles in this section, which together form a cross-cultural examination of ritual meaning and form across repatriation processes.
The magic of bureaucracy: repatriation as ceremony
July 2017
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Journal article
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Museum Worlds
As a curator who has been responsible for the return of Indigenous human remains from a UK museum, I take as a starting point for this article the dossier of paperwork and the administrative acts required to negotiate the decision about a claim and de-accession; to meet requirements for export, customs, and airline transport; and effect the return of human remains. The administrative actions involved in repatriation are forms of ritual, performances of corporate identity, and relations of power. Although museum staff and claimant groups have different agendas in this process, and the nature of their rituals is quite different, administrative and claimant rituals are interdependent across the repatriation process. These intersecting, powerful actions have the same overarching functions for each group: to articulate identities, core values, and structures of power; to open the possibility of new aspects of identity; and to articulate ongoing tensions between majority society and minority claimant groups.
Visiting with the Ancestors Blackfoot Shirts in Museum Spaces
September 2016
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Book
Museums seek to preserve objects for posterity. This volume demonstrates that the emotional and spiritual power of objects does not vanish with the death of those who created them.
Art
A token of remembrance: the gift of a Cree hood, Red River Settlement, 1844
January 2016
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Chapter
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Together We Survive: Ethnographic Intuitions, Friendships and Conversations
Governor William B. Caldwell’s Souvenir: Exoticism and a Gentleman’s Reputation
November 2013
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Journal article
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Manitoba History
This Is Our Life Haida Material Heritage and Changing Museum Practice
November 2013
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Book
Vern Williams said in an interview at the Pitt Rivers Museum that “some people
call these objects, but this is our life.” Sherry found that baskets, and other Haida
treasures, became very much a part of her life as well. Our abiding memory of her
...
Social Science
'Ceremonies of renewal': Visits, relationships, and healing in the museum space
July 2013
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Journal article
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Museum Worlds
Access to heritage objects in museum collections can play an important role in healing from colonial trauma for indigenous groups by facilitating strengthened connections to heritage, to ancestors, to kin and community members in the present, and to identity. Tis article analyzes how touch and other forms of sensory engagement with fve historic Blackfoot shirts enabled Blackfoot people to address historical traumas and to engage in ‘ceremonies of renewal’, in which knowledge, relationships, and identity are strengthened and made the basis of well-being in the present. Te project, which was a museum loan and exhibition with handling sessions before the shirts were placed on displays, implies the obligation of museums to provide culturally relevant forms of access to heritage objects for indigenous communities.
SBTMR
The Blackfoot Shirts Project: ‘Our Ancestors Have Come to Visit
January 2013
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Chapter
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Museum Transformations
Finding long-lost relatives (making the absent present): on the potentialities of North American ethnographic collections in Ireland
January 2012
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Chapter
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Exhibit Ireland: ethnographic collections in Irish museums
‘Just by bringing these photographs…’: On the other meanings of anthropological images
January 2012
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Chapter
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Photography, Anthropology and History: Expanding the Frame
The scholar–practitioner expanded: an indigenous and museum research network
December 2011
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Journal article
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Museum Management and Curatorship
Gathering Places Aboriginal and Fur Trade Histories
January 2010
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Book
It is a product of “where one is placed and where one places oneself within social
networks” that is worked out on the shifting ground between what is possible in a
given time and place and what is forbidden or not yet conceivable. The image ...
History
'Just by bringing these photographs...': On the other meanings of anthropological images
December 2009
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Chapter
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Photography, Anthropology and History: Expanding the Frame
'Almost true': Peter Rindisbacher’s early images of Rupert’s Land, 1821-26
June 2009
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Journal article
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Art History
This article examines early watercolours and sketches by Peter Rindisbacher, who in 1821, emigrated with his family from Switzerland to the Red River Settlement in Winnipeg, Canada. Rindisbacher's work has been praised, and made use of, for its detailed renderings of clothing and objects typical of the Northwestern fur trade. The article examines both the materiality of the images and the materiality within them, in order to understand his European mindset and training and consider their implications for the veracity of his work, which reflects European stereotypes of Aboriginal people. Viewers' responses to Rindisbacher's images are also explored, and the correlation between the assumption of veracity in these images and expectations about the ‘frontier’ is noted. Rindisbacher's images both reflect such expectations, and complicate them.
Red River, aboriginal people, Canada, SBTMR, Peter Rindisbacher, material culture, fur trade
Colonial Photographs and Postcolonial Relationships: the Kainai-Oxford Photographic Histories Project
January 2009
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Chapter
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First Nations, First Thoughts: the impact of Indigenous thought in Canada
Material Culture, Identity, and Colonial Society in the Canadian Fur Trade
January 2009
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Chapter
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Women and Things, 1750-1950: Gendered Material Strategies.
On the treatment of dead enemies: indigenous human remains in Britain in the early 21st century
January 2009
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Chapter
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Social Bodies
Museums and source communities
August 2007
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Chapter
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Museums and their Communities
Playing Ourselves Interpreting Native Histories at Historic Reconstructions
March 2007
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Book
Playing Ourselves explores this major shift in representation, using detailed observations of five historic sites in the U.S. and Canada to both discuss the theoretical aspects of Native cultural performance and advise interpreters and ...
History
On the social, the biological—and the political: revisiting Beatrice Blackwood’s research and teaching
January 2007
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Chapter
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Holistic Anthropology
Introduction
June 2005
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Book
'Pictures bring us messages'/sinaakssiiksi aohtsimaahpihkookiyaawa: Photographs and histories from the Kainai nation
January 2005
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Book
In 1925, Beatrice Blackwood of the University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum took thirty-three photographs of Kainai people on the Blood Indian Reserve in Alberta as part of an anthropological project. In 2001, staff from the museum took copies of these photographs back to the Kainai and worked with community members to try to gain a better understanding of Kainai perspectives on the images. 'Pictures Bring Us Messages' is about that process, about why museum professionals and archivists must work with such communities, and about some of the considerations that need to be addressed when doing so. Exploring the meanings that historic photographs have for source communities, Alison K. Brown, Laura Peers, and members of the Kainai Nation develop and demonstrate culturally appropriate ways of researching, curating, archiving, accessing, and otherwise using museum and archival collections. They describe the process of relationship building that has been crucial to the research and the current and future benefits of this new relationship. While based in Canada, the dynamics of the 'Pictures Bring Us Messages' project is relevant to indigenous peoples and heritage institutions around the world.
Museums and Source Communities A Routledge Reader
June 2003
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Book
This book brings together hitherto uncollected work on one of the most important developments in museology in the past century: collaborative research involving museums and members of ethnographic source communities, and the development of ...
Reference
Strands Which Refuse to be Braided
March 2003
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Journal article
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Journal of Material Culture
This article concerns hair samples collected in 1925 in the Ojibwe community of Red Lake, Minnesota, USA, now in the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. It outlines the process of consultation with community members and of the discovery of the historical context and meanings surrounding the hair. These meanings are emotive because of the conjuncture of Ojibwe beliefs about hair with the history of the cutting and analysis of hair by Whites as part of attempts to control Ojibwe people in various ways. The article also explores the implications of current theory about material culture which sees artefacts as points of contact between peoples, and which focuses on tracing the movements and shifting meanings of artefacts as a way of understanding the relations between the peoples involved.
My First Years in the Fur Trade The Journals of 1802-1804
January 2002
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Book
Captivated by tales of adventure, fifteen-year-old George Nelson left his family in Quebec in 1802 and headed to the Northwest Territory to work for Sir Alexander Mackenzie's XY Company, one of the major fur trade companies of the time.
History
Ellen Smallboy Glimpses of a Cree Woman's Life
September 1995
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Book
See Fort Charles Rupert's Land transfer (1870), 71 Sabatirn, Ellen, 4 sharing
practices, 15, 17, 37-8; decline of, 50, 6o Shewinnoo (Cree man): trading at
Kesagami, 67 Smallboy, Benjamin Samuel (Ellen's son), 32 Smallboy, Charlotte
Lisk.