Lucy Fowler Williams

The dynamic discourse stimulated by 78 magnificent objects created by Native Americans over the years, now housed in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the responses of contemporary Native Americans to those objects forms the core of this book. As seen in these vibrant pages, the Museum is not a place of dead objects from the past. It is, rather, a place of people and ideas about human societies and cultures, a place of living, active objects, a place where the present can connect to the past. The volume editors frame important issues and concepts-the nature of Native American identity in the past and present, indigenous sovereignty, the active destruction of Native American cultures and languages over the past half-millennium, along with their perseverance and strength to survive, and, finally, the power of ancestors. As Richard M. Leventhal, the Museum's Williams Director, notes in his Foreword, the Native American scholars and artists who contribute to this book are assisting the Museum in its attempt to become a more integral part of today's world. It is the preservation of ideas embodied within objects from the past and present that allows for the representation and strength of Native American identity.

Totaling approximately 40,000 objects, the University Museum's ethnographic holdings represent native peoples from ten North American culture areas-the Arctic, Subarctic, Northwest Coast, California, Plateau, Great Basin, Southwest, Great Plains, Northeast, and the Southeast. This guide highlights the strength of the collections and demonstrates how objects are tied to history and people living within different cultural and social contexts. It also underscores that objects have different multiple meanings. Some objects illustrate intertribal relations; others best reflect collecting attitudes at the turn of the century when much of the Museum's collections was acquired. Visitors and off-site readers will learn about such related archival resources as documentation and photographs, past and present Museum exhibitions, current research, repatriation, and contemporary collections development.

Totaling approximately 40,000 objects, the University Museum's ethnographic holdings represent native peoples from ten North American culture areas-the Arctic, Subarctic, Northwest Coast, California, Plateau, Great Basin, Southwest, Great Plains, Northeast, and the Southeast. This guide highlights the strength of the collections and demonstrates how objects are tied to history and people living within different cultural and social contexts. It also underscores that objects have different multiple meanings. Some objects illustrate intertribal relations; others best reflect collecting attitudes at the turn of the century when much of the Museum's collections was acquired. Visitors and off-site readers will learn about such related archival resources as documentation and photographs, past and present Museum exhibitions, current research, repatriation, and contemporary collections development.