Remediating the Boas/Hunt Archive: On Ethnographic Collections, Indigenous Ontologies, and the Problem of Metadata

Franz Boas’s 1897 monograph, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, was a landmark in anthropology for its integrative approach to ethnography, the use of multiple media, and the collaborative role of Boas’s Indigenous partner George Hunt. Not only did the volume draw on existing museum collections from around the world, the two men also left behind a vast and now widely distributed archive of unpublished materials relevant to the creation and afterlife of this groundbreaking text. In this work-in-progress presentation, Aaron Glass will discuss his international and intercultural project to create a new, annotated critical edition of the book—in both print and digital formats—that re-assembles the dispersed materials and re-embeds them within Kwakwa̱ka̱w̓akw ontologies of both persons and things. Building on Indigenous as well as colonial metadata, this project to reassemble and redescribe widely scattered museum collections and archival materials is facilitating a critical historiography of the book and a reactivation of its content for Indigenous futures.