https://omekahist295.jenniferandrella.com/admin/items/show/3
https://omekahist295.jenniferandrella.com/admin/items/show/4
For Omeka, I chose two items potentially from the Blackfoot Nation that I felt represented art and culture in two different ways. The first artifact was Deerskin with Painted Decoration, the museum considers it a painting that stood out to me because it looks very similar to a conventional European painting but used on deerskin hide. So far there is no way of knowing who created the painting and it is disheartening to see that even though the coverage inferred it is from the region where the Blackfoot Nation is from, there does not seem to be enough evidence to confirm it actually belongs to the Backfoot community. The publisher, a non-indigenous person, seems to have had possession of it from around the early to mid-1900s. The second item is one that I was really interested in when I found it, a story called A Moon Story About Duckling transcribed and typed into English. This not only is confirmed to be from the Blackfoot nation but also credits the individuals who spoke and translated it which seems to be rare in archives of indigenous material. I am aware that oral storytelling can be important to indigenous cultures so I was curious about what led to this story being written down in English. This transcript also has a more specific date of origin which could better help contextualize the politics and culture of the Blackfoot nation and its relationship to recording history. In a lot of the classes I am taking this term, we are focusing on the history of records such as maps, treaties, and art. Much of the current way mainstream history is recorded and displayed is through methods created by settlers in indigenous land. A lot of this class seems to be looking at how much of this damage through historic building can be repairable. What I noticed from the two websites I source these two items from. One was from the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian (an outdated name!), and the other was from an online archive specifically made by and from the Blackfoot nation. It makes me wonder how the topic of rights, display, and possession. I think it’d be interesting to compare how these two websites handle their material.
Lua– these are fantastic finds and I especially like that they are in two different collections. The Blackfoot Confederacy is a group of three communities linguistically related– the Kainai (Blood), Pikuni (Piegan), and Siksika (Blackfoot) and their ancestral homelands cover a large stretch between present-day Montana and Alberta. As you described in your post, many items are categorized in very broad terms. In this case, sometimes it’s difficult to delineate if it’s the Blackfoot Confederacy (broadly), the Blackfoot subgroup, or the Piegan (who are called the Blackfeet in the US). It can be very confusing to know which community is under discussion, and the metadata isn’t always helpful.
Your description of the metadata, how it is catalogued, by/for whom, and the problems involved are all very important aspects for understanding these items. Looking more closely at the items (especially the text source) and closely analyzing its details can offer key pieces of contextual information missing from the metadata. I also really enjoyed your comparison between the Smithsonian NMAI and the Blackfoot Digital Library; the fact that the Blackfoot Digital Library included the fields “tribe” and “family” in their metadata shows an additional effort to connect their items within the relations of the community.