WSU News Archive

Kim Christen

PULLMAN, Wash. – The Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums (ATALM) has selected the Plateau People's Web Portal, an interactive, online digital archive developed by Washington State University to provide access to Plateau peoples' cultural materials, to receive a 2012 Guardians of Culture and Lifeways International Award.

 

"This project is an inspiring model of how university repositories can successfully collaborate with tribal communities to curate and enhance collections with tribal voices and histories,” The ATALM said in announcing the award. "The Portal provides a way for tribal communities to include their own knowledge and memories of digital materials for various collections.”

Kim Christen, the project director and associate professor with WSU’s Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies, said what makes the Plateau Portal new and different is how knowledge is shared and cultural concepts dialoged back and forth between all interested parties. Members of the Yakama, Umatilla, Spokane, Colville and Coeur d’Alene nations have the ability to add and curate material from their own tribes, the WSU libraries and the National Anthropological Archives and National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian Institution, curating the portal’s content through an interactive and reciprocal process.

 

Sample of paintings in portal. Jim Kanine is the big chief of the Walla Walla Indians. More information here.

"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 materials are repatriated to tribes and narrated by them.”

 

Established in 2007, the ATALM Guardians of Culture and Lifeways International Awards program identifies and recognizes organizations and individuals who serve as outstanding examples of how indigenous archives, libraries, and museums contribute to the vitality and cultural sovereignty of Native nations. Christen and eight other award recipients this year will be honored on June 5 at the opening day of the International Conference of Indigenous Archives, Libraries, and Museums at the Cherokee-owned Hard Rock Casino and Hotel in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The ATALM Awards Council, consisting of 14 individuals from cultural institutions across the nation, reviewed a record number of nominations for this year’s awards.

More information about the Plateau Portal is available online at http://libarts.wsu.edu/plateaucenter/portalproject/desc.html.

 

Contact:
Kimberly Christen, Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies, 509-335-4177, kachristen@wsu.edu

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