A new type of digital archive could change the way indigenous peoples interact with artifacts housed in university and museum collections.
Kimberly Christen (assistant professor, comparative ethnic studies) has received funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop the Plateau Peoples' Web Portal to digitally catalog cultural materials from Columbia Plateau tribes held in WSU's collections, including WSU Libraries' Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC) unit and the Museum of Anthropology.
Chemawa Indian School (Salem, Oregon) women's basketball team, 1909, from the Chalcraft-Pickering Photograph Collection.
Members of the Yakama, Umatilla, and Coeur d'Alene nations can add to and comment on the records, curating the Plateau Portal archive through an interactive process Christen describes as "a parallel sharing of information."
"The portal provides a mutual knowledge exchange with no hierarchy of expertise," Christen said. "The academic benefit is expanding the scholarly record, and at the same time cultural belongings are being repatriated."
Shawn Lamebull, a member of the Yakama nation and a Ph.D. candidate in American studies, has been working with Christen on the project since its inception.
"The information that can be found here fills in the gaping holes in American history and Washington state history concerning what happened in this area, what tribes were involved, and how it affected what is happening now," said Lamebull.
Shawn Lamebull works at MASC scanning photographs and adding metadata to the digital archive database.
The portal expands on Christen's success with the
Mukurtu Archive, a
culturally sensitive and adaptable digital archive she
and a team of software developers built to return
photographs, videos, and artifacts to the Warumungu
Aboriginal community in Australia's Northern Territory.
What makes the Plateau portal new and different, according to Christen, is that knowledge is shared and concepts dialoged back and forth between all interested parties.
Trevor Bond, interim head and special collections librarian at MASC, said, "Unlike other online tools, Professor Christen has developed her portal with the values of indigenous peoples in mind."
Christen received a Digital Innovation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and funded by the Mellon Foundation to develop the Plateau Portal. The ACLS fellowship program supports projects that advance digital humanistic scholarship.
Christen said the Smithsonian Institution has agreed to act in an advisory capacity through the National Anthropology Archive and the National Museum of the American Indian.
Christen holds an interdisciplinary Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her primary research involves examining contemporary indigenous alliances, primarily in Australia but with comparative global analyses. She is currently exploring the overlap of indigenous cultural heritage, intellectual property rights, and the use of digital technologies in and by indigenous communities.
Lamebull's research interests include tribal sovereignty and Indian law, cross-cultural analysis of tabletop role-playing games and MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games), and representation of "Indians" in popular culture especially video and role-playing games.
The Chronicle, College of Liberal Arts, Washington State University