Inuvialuit trip to the Smithsonian
In November, 2009, I travelled with my friend and colleague Dr. Natasha Lyons and a delegation of Inuvialuit community members from The Inuvialuit Cultural Resource Centre and the Inuvialuit Communications Society to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History to spend a week with the MacFarlane Collection, which had been collected from their territory over 130 years ago. I was privileged to share their experience of encountering these amazing cultural objects for the first time. In the coming months, we hope to connect the digital images and records of the MacFarlane Collection to the Reciprocal Research Network, which would allow Inuvialuit in remote communities to access the collection online, use it local educational and cultural projects, and contribute their intangible knowledge of the objects. For more information about the project, see the Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage Website, (IPinCH), of which this is a case study called “A Case of Access: Inuvialuit Engagement with the Smithsonian’s MacFarlane Collection”. Check out the video produced by the Inuvialuit Communications Society with some highlights from the trip: