Visiting with the Ancestors
Blackfoot Shirts in Museum Spaces
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In the pages of this beautifully illustrated volume is the story of an effort to build a bridge between museums and source communities in hopes of establishing stronger, more sustaining relationships between the two and spurring change in prevailing museum policies. The experience of negotiating the tension between a museum's institutional protocol described by both the authors and by Blackfoot contributors to the volume was transformative. Museums seek to preserve objects for posterity. However, the emotional and spiritual power of objects does not vanish with the death of those who created them. For Blackfoot people today, these shirts are a living presence, one that evokes a sense of continuity and inspires pride in Blackfoot cultural heritage.
About this Author
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). Alison K. Brown's research addresses the ways in which artifacts and photographs can be used to think about colonialism and its legacies. Before joining the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen in 2005, where she is a senior lecturer and co-director (with Nancy Wachowich) of the Northern Colonialism: Historical Connections, Contemporary Lives program, she was Research Manager for Human History at Glasgow Museums.
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