By Julie Carl
The idea first came while sitting on the shores of Lake of the Woods in Kenora, Ontario. New ways of understanding Aboriginal heritage were needed, and Ruth Phillips knew what had to be done.
Working with colleagues, Phillips — Carleton’s Canada Research Chair in Modern Culture, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and professor of art history — has seen the idea through to fruition. The Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures (GRASAC) was born.
GRASAC is an online collaborative research tool that allows researchers from international museums, universities, and Aboriginal communities to connect in order to bring fresh perspectives to the field of art history, ethnography and ethno-history.
The goal of the project is to not only create new, more holistic understandings of Great Lakes expressive culture through partnership and collaboration, but also to restore and repatriate that heritage digitally to the Aboriginal communities that first developed it.
And already, the partnerships being forged are impressive. GRASAC now boasts a membership of well-respected archivists, advisers and scholars from such places as the British Museum, the Canadian Museum of Civilization, Cornell University, Oxford University, the University of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum.
By uniting the visual culture and history of Great Lakes Aboriginal peoples, reconnection with a dispersed heritage is made possible. Advances in technology will help to close the distances that have impeded the understanding of historic Aboriginal collections to date.
“On a fundamental level, GRASAC is a project of reclamation and recovery, reconnection and reintegration,” says Phillips. “It mediates the separation of people from heritage and the enforced losses of traditional knowledge that continue to have serious consequences for Aboriginal identity, spiritual and mental health, and to hinder non-Aboriginal understandings of Aboriginal knowledge systems that are needed now more than ever.”