Events Calendar

Penn Museum Scholars Lunch Lecture Series
Digital Repatriation: Returning Films from the Penn Museum Archives to the Navajo Nation Museum
Timothy B. Powell, Research Project Manager, American Section

The advent of digital technology has created unprecedented and largely unexplored possibilities for collaboration with Native American communities and the repatriation of archival materials. The Penn Museum Archives, Digital Partnerships with Indian Communities (DPIC), the Smithsonian, and the Navajo Nation Museum are currently partnering on a project to repatriate a series of films made as part of the Through Navajo Eyes project, sponsored in part by Penn's Annenberg School in the late 1960s.

Through Navajo Eyes played an important role in the origins of visual anthropology and the films were shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; sadly, they were never returned to the Navajo people who made the films. The talk will address: 1) the role that could be played by the Penn Museum in the digitization of American Indian materials by major cultural institutions across the country; 2) the on-going national debate among archivists about protocols for handling Native American materials; 3) what it means to members of the Pine Springs Navajo community to get these films back after forty years; 4) how Penn undergraduates are playing a meaningful role in this process.

Guests are welcome to bring their lunch.

The lecture will be held in Classroom 2.

Lecture Admission: Pay-what-you-want.