Carrie's Anthropology 196m Blog

So, I got a cold and kinda fell out of the loop the past few days, but I'm back and wanted to offer my (delayed) two cents into the exhibit organization and title brainstorming...

Amanda mentioned in a comment to my post last week that her and Mary were talking about juxtaposing the process of accessioning an artifact vs. de-accessioning because of NAGPRA. I think this would be awesome. I'm thinking it would be great if we can follow how an object comes into a museum and then how it can go out.

We could show how it comes in using Cotton as our prototypical collector- I like the idea someone had of displaying his journal if we have it and I think it would be good to display his book of how much each item cost. Maybe even try to display those baskets that are on the receipt list so people can see the connection. I love the idea of a map of California, maybe we could overlay traditional tribal boundaries on the map so people can get a sense of the Native population in California. Holly's question is a good one though...if we pick baskets outside of CA to display this map might not be as useful.

As for the other side of the exhibit, how an object leaves a museum, I like the idea of including CalNAGPRA in the discussion. I also think it would be good to provide a sense of how many unrecognized tribes there are in CA. I'm am excited about this NAGPRA part of the exhibit, but I'm still not sure how we're going to lay it out. Should we create a fictional example object to follow through-maybe something similar to something we have displayed elsewhere? Or can we use an actual object from the Cotton collection? What do you guys think?

I have been wracking my brain for a week to come up with some title ideas, but alas, I am terrible at titles...so, I'll list my favorites:

I like Nessa's: "Weaving life through Native California" and I also very much like Stacie's "Exhibiting Native America: The Journey from Maker to Museum Display." What about combining the two? We could do "Weaving life through Native California: The Journey from Maker to Museum" --I like that, but maybe we could add something that alludes to the object leaving the museum, though I worry that would be too wordy.