Project Participants
James Francis, Director, Department of Cultural and Historic Preservation, Penobscot Nation
Nick Francis, Office of Information Technology, Penobscot Nation
Jane Anderson, Assistant Professor, New York University
Anna Weinreich, PhD Student, New York University
Project Description
The Penobscot Nation Collections Project focuses on identifying and locating Penobscot tangible and intangible cultural heritage materials in US and Canadian museums, archives, and libraries. The aim of this project is to connect these collections to the Penobscot Nation and to reanimate them according to Penobscot perspectives and values. The Penobscot Nation is working with Mukurtu to import digital catalog records from the databases of collecting institutions. The Penobscot Nation is also developing their own set of Traditional Knowledge Labels (TK Labels) through the Local Contexts project to define and implement culturally appropriate parameters for managing access, and to add metadata, narratives, and tags to individual items in the local database. One of the principal goals is to connect information about a broad range of Penobscot collections and make this information accessible to community members and other researchers interested in tribal history and Penobscot cultural heritage.