There have been many exciting outcomes from the students’ interactions with archival materials.  In the spring of 2010, the class project was to integrate the photography and artifact collections of noted Penn anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell, whose photographs are housed at the APS, and whose artifacts are stored at the Penn Museum.  Not long before the semester started, I had been contacted by Gord Jones, the project manager of Pimachiowin Aki corporation, who is working on submitting a UNESCO World Heritage Site to preserve 40,000 square kilometers of boreal forest and the cultural landscape of five Ojibwe First Nations.  One chllange of the grant is to define a “cultural landscape.”  A number of scholars associated with the Pimachiowin Aki project had come to the APS and digitized material from the Hallowell collection.  Hallowell had worked in Ojibwe First Nation communities in northern Manitoba and Ontario for ten years, so there was a large amount of material related to this very small, remote place.  The students photographed and documented the objects from the Hallowell collection at the Penn Museum and presented them to Ojibwe representatives of the Pimachiowin Aki project at a conference held at the APS shortly after the semester ended.  The students’ material is now part of the grant application.

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Last semester, my students worked in groups to curate an exhibit entitled “Cherokee Stickball,” based on the research of the noted anthropologist Frank Speck.  Speck taught at Penn for half a century, collecting more than 40 stickball sticks for the Penn Museum and depositing photographs of Cherokee stickball games at the APS.  In the 1930s, Speck worked with a Cherokee Medicine Man named Will West Long who provided him with rich ethnographic description of the spiritual dimensions of the game.  At the APS conference in the spring of 2010, Will West’s grandson came to the conference and I was able to interview him along with another very knowledgeable elder.  The students created Quick Time videos, combining Speck’s photographs taken in the 1930s with the contemporary oral histories.  They also photographed all of the sticks in the Penn Museum’s collection and created a database of descriptive materials.  One of the students won a Mellon grant through Penn.  She took the materials to the Eastern Band of the Cherokee in North Carolina.  Today, Cherokee craftsman are recreating the older sticks, based on the students photographs, and the videos will be used in a museum exhibit that will be displayed at the tribally owned Junaluska Museum, located in Robbinsville, North Carolina.