Transforming language revitalization through museum collections

As part of the Recovering Voices endangered language initiative at the Smithsonian Institution, a group of Hopi potters have been working on the collections to identify designs and object histories not otherwise available to the community. The aims of the Hopi project included engagement with specialist knowledge of elder artists as well as ways to facilitate transmission of this linguistic and cultural knowledge to younger generations. Drawing on research from the initial year of this project, I consider unexpected but transformative encounters between curators, community members and collections that resulted in a reconsideration of expectations about divisions between cultural, linguistic, artistic and anthropological knowledge. In particular, I look at our discovery of the unique ‘off-center’ designs of the ancestral Hopi Sityaki pottery that sparked discussions about creativity and cosmology and which held key lessons for younger generations about early Hopi experimentation in art. In particular, these hands-on encounters with collections collapsed Western analytical categories used to determine distinguish between language and the physical world and between contemporary and historic/pre-historic knowledge. In conclusion, I argue for understanding of how working directly with cultural and historical objects facilitates a deeper sense of time and continuity within the language and knowledge revitalization and transmission process

Where Architecture and Art meet

With increased interests in solving complex problems through interdisciplinary research—how best can museums use this approach to address critical social issues? In order to answer this question, an interdisciplinary group of curators, artists and students worked together at the Smithsonian Institution to create an experimental teaching environment to rethink the disciplinary boundaries around the study of the human body. Our aim was to use a range of anthropological, art and science collections and readings to undertake the issues of race, gender, genetics, and disability, and the historic inequities resulting from colonialism. We discuss this endeavor, including the public program we developed—the Face Cast Lab—as well as lessons learned about who affects change through this type of museum-based teaching.

Native American Perspectives on Health and Traditional Ecological Knowledge

BACKGROUND: Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is a conceptual framework that highlights Indigenous knowledge (IK) systems. Although scientific literature has noted the relevance of TEK for environmental research since the 1980s, little attention has been given to how Native American (NA) scholars engage with it to shape tribal-based research on health, nor how non-Native scholars can coordinate their approaches with TEK. This coordination is of particular importance for environmental health sciences (EHS) research exploring interdisciplinary approaches and the integration of environmental and human health. OBJECTIVE: Our perspective on TEK arose from a series of Health and Culture Research Group (HCRG) workshops that identified gaps in existing EHS methodologies that are based on a reliance on Euro-American concepts for assessing environmental exposures in tribal communities. These prior methods neither take into account cultural behavior nor community responses to these. Our objective is to consider NA perspectives on TEK when analyzing relationships between health and the environment and to look at how these may be applied to address this gap. DISCUSSION: The authors-the majority of whom are NA scholars-highlight two research areas that consider health from a TEK perspective: food systems and knowledge of medicinal plants. This research has yielded data, methods, and knowledge that have helped Indigenous communities better define and reduce health risks and protect local natural food resources, and this TEK approach may prove of value to EHS research. CONCLUSION: NA perspectives on TEK resulting from the HCRG workshops provide an opportunity for developing more accurate Indigenous health indicators (IHI) reflecting the conceptualizations of health maintained in these communities. This approach has the potential to bridge the scientific study of exposure with methods addressing a tribal perspective on the sociocultural determinants of health, identifying potential new areas of inquiry in EHS that afford nuanced evaluations of exposures and outcomes in tribal communities.Smithsonian Institution's Consortia; Western Carolina University; National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences; Recovering Voices program of the Smithsonian InstitutionOpen access journalThis item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]