Today at the opening plenary at the 15th annual Maple Leaf and Eagle conference, hosted by the University of Helsinki, I learned for the first time about this fascinating project, headed by Dr. Laura Peers: http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/blackfootshirts/
Although Dr. Peers is a historian who works with physical objects rather than language, there were plenty of terms and ideas from her work that I could apply to my own work on disenfranchised populations. Here are a few examples:
*history/museums tend to be the articulations of “dominant societies”
*there is a need for “alternative” histories
*she talked about “oppositional histories”
*she said that museums in places like Britain, where she works, tend to have “cultural amnesia” about the artifacts they hold and the histories behind them
*the notion of “re-membering,” vs just remembering; in other words, the process of re-experiencing the past and becoming invested in it (I think she attributed this idea to Boas)
*she said that artifacts like the Blackfoot shirts she was talking about are elements of cultural survival; the people who made them put “what they knew into the objects they made.”
Although Dr. Peers is in a completely different field than me, her presentation was very tangible and relevant.