Category: General (Re)Connections Through Time: Exploring Narrative and Film in the Context of Native American Museum Connections

(Re)Connections Through Time: Exploring Narrative and Film in the Context of Native American Museum Connections


October 25, 2024

Join us on October 25th from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. in room 112 of Old Hort for (Re)Connections Through Time: Exploring Narrative and Film in the Context of Native American Museum Connections

Native communities have long been excluded from the process of knowledge construction about their ancestral places. This exclusion has taken many forms: lack of voice or authority in museum excavations, curation and exhibits; inaccessibility of collections that were physically removed from Native lands to geographically distant institutions or sold to collectors; the use of non-Native knowledge systems to classify and describe ancestral items; maps of ancient places that omit contemporary Tribal lands/Nations and Indigenous forms of mapping; and the use of anglicized place names that obscure Native connections. In aggregate, these systematic exclusions alienate Native people from their own history and impoverish our national understandings of the past. To help make positive steps toward remediation, our project "(Re)Connections Through Time: Developing a Model for multi-modal storytelling about Indigenous communities and their collections" is focused on the physical process of connecting and reconnecting descendent community members from the Pueblo of Zuni and the Hopi Tribe (First Mesa) with ancestral connections and places creating digital films that directly reach those communities as well as the broader public. We hope this work will inspire the next generation of Native artists, museum curators, and cultural resource managers and provide a model for how we might confront the history of archaeological extraction to amplify enduring, vibrant indigenous histories of connection.

Dr. Heitman is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and the Associate Director of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

She is a globally engaged anthropologist, archaeologist, and digital humanist. Carrie has helped lead various collaborative, open-access digital cultural heritage projects including the "Chaco Research Collection," and the "Ohio Hopewell: Ancient Crossroads of the American Midwest Project." Among other topics, her research explores how new technologies can support scholarly communication and facilitate responsible and inclusive digital access to cultural heritage information.

 

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