The growth of collaboration between museums and source communities - the people from whom collections originate - is one of the most important developments in modern museum practice.
This volume combines some of the most influential published research in this emerging field with newly commissioned essays on the issues, problems and lessons involved.
Focusing on museums in North America, the Pacific and the United Kingdom, the book highlights three areas which demonstrate the new developments most clearly:
*The museum as field site or 'contact zone' - a place which source community members enter for purposes of consultation and collaboration
*Visual repatriation - the use of photography to return images of ancestors, historical moments and material heritage to source communities
*Exhibition case studies - these are discussed to reveal the implications of cross-cultural and collaborative research for museums, and how such projects have challenged established attitudes and practices

As the first overview of its kind, this collection will be essential reading for museum staff working with source communities, for community members involved with museum programmes, and for students and academics in museum studies and social anthropology.

The growth of collaboration between museums and source communities - the people from whom collections originate - is one of the most important developments in modern museum practice.
This volume combines some of the most influential published research in this emerging field with newly commissioned essays on the issues, problems and lessons involved.
Focusing on museums in North America, the Pacific and the United Kingdom, the book highlights three areas which demonstrate the new developments most clearly:
*The museum as field site or 'contact zone' - a place which source community members enter for purposes of consultation and collaboration
*Visual repatriation - the use of photography to return images of ancestors, historical moments and material heritage to source communities
*Exhibition case studies - these are discussed to reveal the implications of cross-cultural and collaborative research for museums, and how such projects have challenged established attitudes and practices

As the first overview of its kind, this collection will be essential reading for museum staff working with source communities, for community members involved with museum programmes, and for students and academics in museum studies and social anthropology.

For nearly 350 years after Columbus's landing, the remote Northern Rocky mountain homeland of the Flathead and Coeur d'Alene tribes remained a safe haven, virtually unmapped and unexplored by whites. But heralded by Indian prophecies and a request for missionaries, in 1841, the Belgian-born Jesuit Pierre-Jean De Smet arrived among the Flathead, or Salish, in western Montana. His dream of founding an empire of Christian Indians sparked instead a confrontation and dialogue between two sacred worlds: an invasion of the heart.In full color, with two hundred illustrations, Sacred Encounters captures on the page the emotional tension, drama, and multiple voices of the exhibition of the same title. With the collaboration of more than one hundred Native American, Jesuit, curatorial, and academic consultants, Sacred Encounters bridges the fine arts, history, and ethnography to evoke the ongoing dialogue between Christianity and traditional Indian belief that produced new ways of life and new ways of believing for native and newcomer alike. Among the illustrations are photographs of newly discovered drawings and watercolors by Jesuit artist Nicolas Point; maps by De Smet and Indian mapmakers; rare battle drawings by the Salish warrior Five Crows; and mid nineteenth-century Plateau and Plains Indian artifacts associated with the travels of De Smet, the Audubon expedition, fur trader Robert Campbell, and Canadian artist Paul Kane.

Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America explores how close, collaborative looking can discern the traces of contact, exchange, and movement of objects and give them a life and political power in complex cross-cultural histories. Red River coats, prints of colonial places and peoples, Indigenous-made dolls, and an Englishwoman's collection provide case studies of art and material culture that correct and give nuance to global and imperial histories. The result of a collaborative research process involving Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors, this book looks closely at the circumstances of making, use, and circulation of these objects: things that supported and defined both Indigenous resistance and colonial and imperial purposes. Contributors re-envision the histories of northern North America by focusing on the lives of things flowing to and from this vast region between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, showing how material culture is a critical link that tied this diverse landscape to the wider world. An original perspective on the history of northern North American peoples grounded in things, Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America provides a key analytical and methodological lens that exposes the complexity of cultural encounters and connections between local and global communities.

"The writings of fur trader George Nelson are wonderfully rich, vivid, and personal. Laura Peers and Theresa Schenck have rendered great service in bringing these writings forward, editing and annotating them witgh care and empathy. This is a significant work for all who are interested in Native and fur trade history and seek to imagine what life was really like in those times."

Jennifer S. H. Brown, author of Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Comapny Families in Indian Country

"There was no other fur trader like George Nelson. He was a pure ethnographer of the world around him and of the content of his own heart. Like Defoe and Melville, he was a tolerant, sympathetic teller of truth, but he had his own clear voice. At long last, thanks to the splendid work of Peers and Schenck, he may finally get the honor that was always due him: a following of grateful readers."

Bruce White, author of We Are at Home: Pictures of the Ojibwe People

Peers examines the emergence of the western Ojibwa in the context of the historical forces that acted upon Native people and the spirit, determination, and strategies used to cope with those forces. She bases the work on fur-trade-company and government documents, traders' and missionaries' journals and diaries, letters, reminiscences, as well as ethnographic and archaeological data, material culture, and photographic and art images - many sources not accessible to pioneering scholars.

In September 2009, twenty-one members of the Haida Nation went to the Pitt Rivers Museum and the British Museum to work with several hundred heritage treasures. Featuring contributions from all the participants and a rich selection of illustrations, This Is Our Life details the remarkable story of the Haida Project - from the planning to the encounter and through the years that followed. A fascinating look at the meaning behind objects, the value of repatriation, and the impact of historical trajectories like colonialism, this is also a story of the understanding that grew between the Haida people and museum staff.

In the pages of this beautifully illustrated volume is the story of aneffort to build a bridge between museums and source communities inhopes of establishing stronger, more sustaining relationships betweenthe two and spurring change in prevailing museum policies. Theexperience of negotiating the tension between a museum’sinstitutional protocol described by both the authors and by Blackfootcontributors to the volume was transformative. Museums seek to preserveobjects for posterity. However, the emotional and spiritual power ofobjects does not vanish with the death of those who created them. ForBlackfoot people today, these shirts are a living presence, one thatevokes a sense of continuity and inspires pride in Blackfoot culturalheritage.

Across North America, hundreds of reconstructed Oliving historyO sites, which traditionally presented history from a primarily European perspective, have hired Native staff in an attempt to communicate a broader view of the past. 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 their managers on how to more effectively present an inclusive history. Drawing on anthropology, history, cultural performance, cross-cultural encounters, material culture theory, and public history, author Laura Peers examines Oliving historyO sites as locations of cultural performance where core beliefs about society, cross-cultural relationships, and history are performed. In the process, she emphasizes how choices made in the communication of history can both challenge these core beliefs about the past and improve cross-cultural relations in the present.

British traders and Ojibwe hunters. Cree women and their metis
daughters. Explorers and anthropologists and Aboriginal guides and
informants. These people, their relationships, and their complex
identities and worldviews were not featured in histories of North
America until the 1970s, when scholars from multiple disciplines began
to bring new perspectives and approaches to bear on the past.

"Gathering Places" presents some of the most innovative and
interdisciplinary approaches to metis, fur trade, and First Nations
history being practised today. Whether they are discussing dietary
practices on the Plateau, trees as cultural and geographical markers in
the trade, the meanings of totemic signatures, issues of representation
in public history, or the writings of Aboriginal anthropologists and
historians, the authors link archival, archaeological, material, oral,
and ethnographic evidence to offer novel explorations that extend
beyond earlier scholarship centred on the archive. They draw on
Aboriginal perspectives, material forms of evidence, and personal
approaches to history to illuminate cross-cultural encounters and
challenge older approaches to the past.

These fascinating essays on aspects of the history of Rupert's
Land mark a significant departure from the old paradigm of history
writing and will serve as models for recovering and communicating
Aboriginal and cross-cultural experiences and perspectives.

In September 2009, twenty-one members of the Haida Nation went to the Pitt Rivers Museum and the British Museum to work with several hundred heritage treasures. Featuring contributions from all the participants and a rich selection of illustrations, This Is Our Life details the remarkable story of the Haida Project - from the planning to the encounter and through the years that followed. A fascinating look at the meaning behind objects, the value of repatriation, and the impact of historical trajectories like colonialism, this is also a story of the understanding that grew between the Haida people and museum staff.