Twenty-year anniversaries are most often associated with marriages or employment milestones, not international scholarly research projects … especially in the humanities.
But that’s exactly what the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts & Cultures (GRASAC) celebrated this summer. That’s two decades of preserving, celebrating and sharing cultural belongings and information about First Nations heritage in Canada and around the world while strengthening ties with international scholars and Indigenous communities.
Launched in 2005, GRASAC is a multi-disciplinary research network with more than 500 members who jointly research Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat cultures of the Great Lakes region of Turtle Island.
With a goal of bolstering and supporting Indigenous communities, cultural institutions and scholars alike, the GRASAC platform was created through support from the Faculty of Arts & Science, the Department of History and the Faculty of Information.
It now houses digital records of more than 5,000 Great Lakes heritage items and two online dictionaries with 17,000 Anishinaabemowin and Cayuga words. The site catalogues a variety of belongings (referred to as “relatives” by GRASAC) including moccasins, headdresses, tools, blankets, hunting weapons, pipes, dolls, crafts, and historic photographs and artwork.
But the site goes beyond just photos and dates. Every item listed has several image entries and a description outlining its function and how it was made. Also noted is each item’s creation date, building materials, and its current physical location. Entries for some materials also include a searchable map that locates the heritage item’s place of origin.
How does it feel for GRASAC co-founder, Heidi Bohaker — who first launched the initiative as a doctoral student with her then post-doctoral supervisor and other colleagues — to reach such an impressive achievement?
“It’s a sense of accomplishment and pride for sure,” says Bohaker, a professor with the Department of History. “It’s also a sense of amazement at watching students who were once working with us as research assistants, who are now graduates of various advanced degree programs or are faculty themselves.”
“So often, humanities research that’s community driven is not the kind of research that gets to be in the limelight,” says Cara Krmpotich, a professor with the Faculty of Information who joined GRASAC as co-director in 2017. “What makes GRASAC so special is the willingness people have to share, rather than guard, what they know.”
Looking back, Bohaker reflects on how much things have changed — for example, how museums were initially hesitant to work with GRASAC on a digital platform.
I feel a sense of responsibility to make sure GRASAC lasts another 20 years. The young people who are part of GRASAC are doing tremendous work. We look to them as leaders and the future of not just GRASAC, but all of the work happening in Indigenous cultural heritage.
“Twenty years ago, museums were very nervous about putting anything on the web,” says Bohaker.
What’s also changed is GRASAC’s relationships with museums and how they too are evolving with respect to their connection with neighbouring communities. In fact, Bohaker believes that GRASAC’s community-based approach is rubbing off.
“Museums didn't have the same kind of connections with communities whose items they're hosting,” she says. “Now, there's more of a dialogue and exchange of ideas. Museums are repatriating items back to communities when appropriate. And in other cases, museums are integrating community ideas and knowledge into how they care for items.”
What also continues to evolve is the ever-expanding relationships with scholars, museums and institutions from around the world that house First Nation cultural belongings.
The GRASAC site now includes items currently held in Ireland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and other nations. This summer, GRASAC solidified a new relationship with the Slovene Ethnographic Museum in Slovenia.
As these relationships expand and grow, so too does the movement of reparative description — a revisiting of the language used on the GRASAC potential to better describe these items.
“Historically, when museums and archives described artifacts, they sought to be as objective and neutral as possible,” says Krmpotich. But despite striving for neutrality, the language used was often very discriminatory and racist.
A reparative description is crafted through an anti-racist and anti-oppressive lens and tries to mitigate the historic racism in past records — an ambitious project Bohaker and Krmpotich believe will take about five years to complete.
“We ask ourselves, ‘If you were an Indigenous artist or an Indigenous young person, and you're using GRASAC for the first time, what are the words used to describe your relatives?” says Krmpotich. “Do they make you feel good? Do they make you feel proud?”
Bohaker and Krmpotich point to GRASAC’s achievements as a testament to collaborative effort and vision.
“I think of how much we've all learned, and the relationships that have come out of other relationships — that’s what I'm most proud of,” says Bohaker. “We’ve become good friends with so many people over the years, meeting together, teaching each other. It's changed how we work as researchers, and it’s had a big impact on me as a historian.”
Looking ahead, Bohaker and Krmpotich are excited about the future, with new collections, new partnerships and new collaborations on the horizon.
“But it's not just about bigger, it’s about better,” says Krmpotich. “We always ask ourselves, ‘Are we caring for this knowledge in the best way?’”
“Because the Faculty of Arts & Science has been so supportive of the project, we're envisioning GRASAC as a resource that new generations will use, and that it will continue to accelerate research,” says Bohaker.
“I feel a sense of responsibility to make sure GRASAC lasts another 20 years,” says Krmpotich. “The young people who are part of GRASAC are doing tremendous work. We look to them as leaders and the future of not just GRASAC, but all of the work happening in Indigenous cultural heritage.”