Pictures Bring Us Messages / Sinaakssiiksi aohtsimaahpihkookiyaawa: Photographs and Histories from the Kainai Nation

by Alison K. Brown, Laura Peers

In 1925, Beatrice Blackwood of the University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum took thirty-three photographs of Kainai people on the Blood Indian Reserve in Alberta as part of an anthropological project. In 2001, staff from the museum took copies of these photographs back to the Kainai and worked with community members to try to gain a better understanding of Kainai perspectives on the images. 'Pictures Bring Us Messages' is about that process, about why museum professionals and archivists must work with such communities, and about some of the considerations that need to be addressed when doing so. Exploring the meanings that historic photographs have for source communities, Alison K. Brown, Laura Peers, and members of the Kainai Nation develop and demonstrate culturally appropriate ways of researching, curating, archiving, accessing, and otherwise using museum and archival collections. They describe the process of relationship building that has been crucial to the research and the current and future benefits of this new relationship. While based in Canada, the dynamics of the 'Pictures Bring Us Messages' project is relevant to indigenous peoples and heritage institutions around the world.

420 pages, Paperback

First published January 20, 2006

Reviews

[Dasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book serves as an example of trying to ethical, collaborative research with Indigenous peoples. The authors meticulously go over how they conducted their work, what goals they had, and why. They emphasize that the process of working with Kainai community members did not limit what they could say but rather allowed them to create a more thoughtful and insightful final work. My main critique is that this book is mostly the authors talking - I wish they would have put all of that in an introduction and then allowed the Kainai interviewees words to fill the rest of the book (ala Our Grandmothers' Lives as Told in Their Own Words). I appreciated the appendix that included Kainai reflections on Blackwell's diary entries - it was the best part of the book because it focused solely on what Kainai people had to say!