Plateau Tribes to Curate WSU Digital Collection

PULLMAN, Wash. - The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has awarded Kimberly Christen, assistant professor of comparative ethnic studies at Washington State University, a Digital Innovation Fellowship funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The ACLS fellowship program supports projects that advance digital humanistic scholarship.

Christen is developing the Plateau Peoples' Web Portal, a digital archive that could change the way indigenous peoples interact with cultural artifacts housed in university and museum collections.

Cultural materials from Columbia Plateau tribes held in WSU's collections, including WSU Libraries' Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections unit (MASC) and the Museum of Anthropology, are being digitally catalogued for Plateau Portal use.

The portal expands on Christen's success with the Mukurtu Archive, a culturally sensitive and adaptable digital archive she and a team of software developers built to return photographs, videos and artifacts to the Warumungu Aboriginal community in Australia's Northern Territory.

What makes the Plateau Portal new and different, according to Christen, is that knowledge is shared and concepts dialoged back and forth between all interested parties.

Members of the Yakama, Umatilla and Coeur d'Alene nations will have the ability to add to and comment on the records, curating the Plateau Portal archive through an interactive process that Christen described as "a parallel sharing of information."

"The portal provides a mutual knowledge exchange with no hierarchy of expertise," Christen said. "The academic benefit is expanding the scholarly record, and at the same time cultural belongings are being repatriated."

Trevor Bond, interim head and special collections librarian at MASC, said, "Unlike other online tools, Professor Christen has developed her portal with the values of indigenous peoples in mind."

Shawn LameBull, a member of the Yakima nation and a graduate student in American studies at WSU, has been working with Christen on the Plateau Portal.

Said LameBull, "The information that can be found here in the WSU Libraries' Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections fills in the gaping holes in American history and Washington state history concerning what happened in this area, what tribes were involved and how it affected what is happening now."

Through his work on the Plateau Portal, LameBull said, "Dr. Christen has allowed me to give back to my tribe as well as the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation and the Coeur d'Alene."

Christen said the Smithsonian Institution has agreed to act in an advisory capacity through the National Anthropology Archive and the National Museum of the American Indian.

For more information about the Plateau Portal, visit http://libarts.wsu.edu/plateaucenter/portalproject/desc.html