Mukurtu, the Spalding-Allen Collection, and the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal

This illustrated presentation will describe the origins and development of the Murkutu platform with a focus on the Niimíipuu (Nez Perce) Tribe’s presentation of the Spalding-Allen Collection.

In 1847, missionary Henry Spalding shipped two barrels of “Indian curiosities”—exquisite Nez Perce shirts, dresses, baskets, horse regalia, and more—to an Ohio friend, Dudley Allen. Given just six months in 1993 by the Ohio Historical Society to purchase the collection, the Nez Perce Tribe launched a brilliant grassroots campaign and raised $608,100 to reclaim their exploited cultural heritage.

Trevor will describe the process of adding the Spalding-Allen Collection to the Plateau Peoples' Web Portal including the creation of community records and the sharing of research materials. The Plateau People’s Web portal uses the Mukurtu (MOOK-oo-too), an open source platform built with Indigenous communities to manage and share digital cultural heritage.

Speaker: Dr. Trevor James Bond is the Co-Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation and the Associate Dean for Digital Initiatives and Special Collections at the Washington State University Libraries.

Respondent: Dr. Anu Vedantham is the Assistant University Librarian for Research Services and chairs the Princeton University Library’s Indigenous Studies Working Group.

Moderator: Keely Smith is a PhD candidate in History at Princeton. She studies Creek and Seminole communication networks and their expressions of sovereignty during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Keely is the graduate assistant for the Indigenous Studies Digital Humanities Working Group.

This event is part of CDH-PUL Collections as Data series, and is sponsored by the CDH Indigenous Studies Digital Humanities Working Group and the Princeton University Library.
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