Social Science Native American Studies
Pictures Bring Us Messages / Sinaakssiiksi aohtsimaahpihkookiyaawa
Photographs and Histories from the Kainai Nation
- Publisher
- University of Toronto Press
- Initial publish date
- Dec 2006
- Category
- Native American Studies, Native American, General
-
Hardback
- ISBN
- 9780802090065
- Publish Date
- Jan 2006
- List Price
- $95.00
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780802048912
- Publish Date
- Jan 2006
- List Price
- $53.00
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781442657922
- Publish Date
- Dec 2006
- List Price
- $40.95
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Description
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.
About the authors
Alison K. Brown is a research fellow with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen.
Laura Peers is interested in the meanings that heritage objects hold for Indigenous peoples today and in relationships between museums and Indigenous peoples. Her publications include Museums and Source Communities (with Alison K. Brown), “Ceremonies of Renewal: Visits, Relationships and Healing in the Museum Space,” and This Is Our Life: Haida Material Heritage and Changing Museum Practice (with Cara Krmpotich).
Awards
- Finalist for Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize
