Concepts That Bite Through Time: Blackfoot Objects as Curriculum

Panel and online technical workshop This panel will discuss approaches for connecting Blackfoot and non-Indigenous audiences with Blackfoot historical objects that are housed in museum collections located far from Blackfoot traditional territory. We will discuss the specifics of working with historical Blackfoot objects in British museum collections alongside Blackfoot Elders and students as well as our strategies for engaging audiences living in Treaty 7 territory in Southern Alberta, Canada through art-based programming and online exhibitions. Objects as Curriculum (workshop item) This workshop will seek to introduce the symposium audience to both the digital technologies and the digital artefacts assembled during the first phase of the Objects as Curriculum project. This project, a New Frontiers funded collaboration between Blackfoot Elders, The Digital Blackfoot Library, UoL, UoA and UoS seeks to make 3D images of Blackfoot objects held in museums in the UK accessible to their home people in order to explore the knowledge embedded in them. Can these digital techniques help to impart traditional skills such as quillwork and how do these digital assemblages travel themselves? By introducing this project through a workshop format with demonstrations of the technical processes of photogrammetry and Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) this event will seek to raise questions and continue the ongoing dialogue between the matter, skills, crafting and transfer rights bound within the physical objects and the shifting ontologies of the digital artefacts.