Concepts Have Teeth

Concepts Have Teeth, And Teeth That Bite Through Time: digital imaging and Blackfoot material culture in UK museums.

Project duration: 1 December 2020 - 30 June 2022
Funded by: AHRC (UK)

Concepts Have Teeth is an AHRC networking project. We are a group of Blackfoot-led researchers, artists, archaeologists and museum professionals working to connect historical Blackfoot objects held in collections in Britain with the Niitsitapi. The UK network is led by Louisa Minkin in conjunction with Knowledge Holders of the Blackfoot people and colleagues from National Museums Scotland, the University of Southampton, the University of Lethbridge, Canada.

The title of our project is directly from political anthropologist Audra Simpson:

Historical perceptibility is used, and is still used, to claim, to define capacities for self-rule, to apportion social and political possibilities, to, in effect, empower and disempower Indigenous peoples in the present. Such categorical forms of recognition and mis-recognition are indebted to deep philosophical histories of seeing and knowing [...] And so it is that concepts have teeth and teeth that bite through time.

— Audra Simpson, 'Ethnographic Refusal', Junctures, 2007, p.69

Project summary

Concepts Have Teeth and its sister project on Blackfoot traditional territory Mootookakio’ssin [Distant Awareness] funded by a grant from the New Frontiers in Research Fund, administered by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, aim to connect Blackfoot people living in North America with their cultural heritage held by museums in the UK. Directed by knowledge holders from Kainai, Piikani, Siksika, and Amskapipiikani nations, the project is a collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, artists, archaeologists, museum professionals and students. The project uses digital imaging techniques, art-based public engagement and spatial web technologies. These tools will improve the ability of Blackfoot people to interact with their historical belongings and recover and shape their own narratives surrounding them.

Objectives

To establish an expanded transdisciplinary network to share methods and local examples in the digitisation of collections to enhance understanding, connection and access and support cultural revitalisation for Indigenous communities, with specific reference to Blackfoot quillwork.
To investigate how the critical approaches and practices of fine artists working with digital imaging technologies can contribute to conceiving new space as active platforms for co-production, consultation and event-based learning across disciplines and audiences.
To examine how digital imaging techniques (in dialogue with traditional makers in the Blackfoot community) could be utilised to reveal and share lost knowledge of crafting techniques relating to Blackfoot artefacts in UK museums.
To examine the role of Indigenous knowledge in strategies of digital documentation, and how this knowledge might act as leverage to question wider interpretations and. assumptions relating to the ontological composition of material culture.

Project team

Blackfoot Advisory Group

Knowledge Holders from Kainai, Piikani, Siksika, and Amskapipiikani are directing the project
Jerry Potts
Velma Crowshoe
Kent Ayoungman
Linda Little Chief
John Murray
Carol Murray
Martin Heavy Head
Leroy Littlebear
Amethyst First Rider

UK project team

Principal Investigator: Louisa Minkin, Reader in Visual Art Practices at Central Saint Martins
Andrew Meirion Jones, Professor of Archaeology, University of Stockholm
Co-Investigator: Ian Dawson, Co-Director of the Critical Practices Research Group, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton
Thomas Allison, artist, CSM

University of Lethbridge Research Team

Christine Clark, Assistant Professor of New Media
Josephine Mills, Director and curator of the U of L Art Gallery
Danielle Heavy Head, Blackfoot Digital Library liaison
Jackson 2Bears, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts Research and Technology.
Marcus Dostie, Geography instructor
Melissa Shouting, Master Student in Health Science

National Museums Scotland

John Giblin, Keeper for the Department of World Cultures
Ali Clark, Senior Curator: Oceania and the Americas

University of Aberdeen

Alison Brown, Professor of Social Anthropology
Museums and Special Collections

Hastings Museum and Art Gallery

Eleanor Lanyon, Collections and Engagement Curator