The Blackfoot Shirts Project: “Our Ancestors Have Come to Visit”

Abstract

In 2010, at the request of Blackfoot ceremonial leaders, five early nineteenth century shirts in the collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, were loaned to museums in Southern Alberta, Canada, as part of a project aimed at exploring the contemporary meanings of these historic garments to Blackfoot people today. Before the shirts were exhibited, handling sessions – or “visits” – were arranged for Blackfoot elders, ceremonial leaders, artists, teachers, and high school and college students. These sessions provided opportunities for people to reconnect with the historic and cultural knowledge embedded within the shirts, much of which has become fragmented within their own communities. Interviews with session participants highlighted how such direct engagements with the shirts have contributed to the revitalization of artistic knowledge and ceremonial traditions. Such projects raise challenges, however, for both the museums and the communities engaged in them. This chapter explores the immediate impacts of the shirts’ visit to Blackfoot territory, and the tensions and difficulties raised by such work.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.