Great cover for a great book!

It's very exciting to have this glimpse of the long-awaited book on the Blackfoot Shirts Project! The publishers, Athabasca University Press in Canada, have done justice to the beauty of the shirts with the cover design. Now we are looking forward to seeing the proofs of the book in a few months! The book is very multivocal, with lots of sidebars, quotes, essays by project participants, and photographs telling the story of the project, so design will be important to convey the many messages. Watch this space...

A tough audience

(image from Helen Mears' blog post for the Museum Ethnographers' Group, on the Future of the Ethnographic Museum conference at Oxford; see http://htl.li/2yK5Dq)

This is one of the more challenging professional moments I have faced in a long time: me, and about 50 other museum professionals, crammed into the Visiting with the Ancestors (Blackfoot Shirts Project) exhibition at the Pitt Rivers at the start of the Future of the Ethnographic Museum conference recently. 

My audience included just about everybody who might write and publish about the PRM in the next decade: colleagues from all across Europe and the UK, delegates from around the world (Israel, Brazil, New Zealand, North America...) and luminaries James Clifford and Ruth Phillips. I had designed the exhibition knowing that it would be up during the conference and that this moment would come, but I have to say it was a great relief to finally face it and receive positive feedback.

There are many special things about the exhibition. One is that its themes and content came from Blackfoot mentors. We were actually planning a book about the project when we met with them in 2011 to ask what they wanted it to say and what tone and format they would prefer; I simply pulled the outline for the book into 3-D for the exhibition.

The exhibit tells the story of the project, of why we took the shirts back to Alberta, of the processes involved in building relationships with Blackfoot people, of what happened when the shirts returned and people were able to learn from them, of how the project changed the museum profession in the UK, and of how Blackfoot people feel now that the shirts are back in Oxford. There are three of the shirts in the centre of the room, and around the walls we have quotes from participants, photographs of every stage of the process (including one of the crate holding the shirts, painted bright pink for visibility, on the tarmac at Heathrow), and a wonderful video about the project's impact in Blackfoot communities by Narcisse Blood.

It was gratifying to see my colleagues respond to an exhibition about a project process. It was especially gratifying because another special thing about this exhibition is that PRM staff did it in-house. We didn't have the budget to hire an external designer, so we designed it ourselves, took courses on graphic design, found suppliers to print the text, and physically installed it ourselves (thanks Alan and Chris!). 

It's been an amazing thing to see the ancestors teaching yet another audience, and inspiring museum staff here at PRM--and around the world--to learn and develop.

Things we have learned from the Blackfoot Shirts Project

Detail, Blackfoot shirt 1893.67.1, Pitt Rivers Museum. 

The membrane under the quill wrapping is visible in the centre of the image.

Today I’m giving a talk to colleagues here at the Pitt Rivers Museum about the Blackfoot Shirts Project. Since most of them have been part of the project—indeed in many ways it has been their project more than mine, I just write the grants and give the occasional shove—there actually isn’t much about it that they don’t know. So, I thought I would talk about what we all learned from the project, in different ways.

For those of you who haven’t been following this, the Blackfoot Shirts Project in a nutshell is: a group of us brought 5 hide and quill and hairlock shirts, collected in 1841, from Oxford back to museums in Blackfoot country, and invited 500 Blackfoot people to touch them. Not surprisingly, amazing things happened, and we are still thinking about responses to the shirts. You can learn more about the project at: http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/blackfootshirts/

So what did we learn?

Firstly, by spending a lot of time preparing the shirts for travel and then looking at them closely with Blackfoot people, we learned about the shirts: that some of the decorative material is not porcupine quill but bulrush, for instance. We learned about paints and dyes (who knew that blue was from duck poop?). We realized that the quill wrappings on the hairlocks are done over a foundation of some kind of membrane which is slipped over the bundles of hair: pericardium? Vein? We realized that there are the long-dead carcasses of nits still clinging to the hairs. And we realized that the shirts’ histories, before and after collection, are there to be seen: coal dust from the Hopkins’ home, tack marks from being stuck to the walls, bits of red ochre on the inside from contact with men painted for spiritual protection.

We tend to see the surface of objects in museums. It’s only when you spend this much time and energy really, really looking hard that you see beyond that, to the processes of making and storing and displaying that make up an object’s histories.

And we learned that these are not ‘objects’: they are also material forms of spirits, of those who made and used them, and those whose physical bodies are present in the hides, sinew, quills and hair. For Blackfoot people, these are ancestors, not museum specimens.

Having learned this, we think differently about the shirts now that they are back at PRM. We have a stronger sense of stewardship and of Blackfoot people as having ties to the shirts: we feel accountable. We have realized that just because objects enter museums, their lives don’t stop. They can go out and have adventures. One of these very old, very rare, very fragile shirts was used in a ceremony while we were in Alberta. We realized that it might have acquired some sacred paint during the ceremony, and we decided that if that was the case, we would not think of it as damage: it would be a mark of the shirt’s ongoing life. For a museum, that’s learning quite a bit.

Visiting with relatives...in Oxford

Over the past few years, a group of Blackfoot shirts at the Pitt Rivers Museum has been the focus of a remarkable project to enable Blackfoot people to reconnect with and learn from these important heritage objects. The first thing that we learned was that the shirts are not simply 'objects': they are collections of animate spirits. Three of the shirts have hairlocks of human and horse hair, which denote them as sacred. The shirts were collected in 1841 by Edward Hopkins, the secretary to the governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. When he retired in 1870, he moved to England and took the shirts with him. His family transferred them to the Museum in 1893 after his death.

We wanted to make it possible for Blackfoot people to literally reconnect with these ancestors, to actually touch them gently and learn from them directly. We worked with Alison Brown at the University of Aberdeen, who has a long history of working with Blackfoot people, and the Head of Conservation at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Heather Richardson, who did an internship at the National Museum of the American Indian, working on---their Plains shirts exhibition! Heather agreed to come to Alberta with us, Alison organized small group workshops, the Glenbow and the Galt Museums agreed to host us, and we took the ancestors home for a visit.

Wonderful things happened as a result. Ceremonial leaders, elders, artists, teachers, and college and high school students learned and shared so much knowledge with each other. People sang honor songs to the ancestors, brought them gifts, touched them gently, were moved to tears by their beauty and power. Students learned to do hide tanning and a bit of porcupine quillwork in preparation for meeting their ancestors, and one community revived a ceremony that had been dormant for many decades.

We also wanted to make it possible for museum visitors in the UK to learn from the shirts, and about the importance of the shirts to Blackfoot people today. We wanted to communicate about this kind of work, which is becoming such a part of what museums do. This week, we are opening an exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum called 'Visiting with the Ancestors,' which features three of the shirts, and images and words from Blackfoot participants in the project. The exhibit tells the story of the project, of what happened when the shirts went home for a visit, of how Blackfoot people feel about the project.

To celebrate the exhibition opening, we are delighted to have Blackfoot guests, an extended family of people who have brought their infant grandson to visit with the ancestors. And to visit with us. It means a lot when relatives visit from overseas.