Bruchac, Margaret
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Disciplines
Arts and Humanities
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Social and Behavioral Sciences
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Position
Associate Professor, Coordinator of Native American & Indigenous Studies
Introduction
Museum Anthropology: curation and representation, cultural property and provenance, living history interpretation, repatriation. Native American Studies: Indigenous epistemologies, colonial encounters, ethnohistory, transculturalism, sovereignty. Cultural Expression: performance, cultural recovery, language revitalization, indigenous modern art, oral traditions, ritual, ethnomusicology, visual anthropology. Indigenous Archaeologies: historical memory, material analysis, decolonizing theory, cultural resource management. Research Fellowships and Awards: American Philosophical Society, Five College Minority Fellowship, Ford Foundation, School for Advanced Research, University of Massachusetts Amherst Graduate Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Foundation Faculty Fellowship, etc.
Research Interests
Collection
54 results
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Now showing 1 - 10 of 54
Publication Visualizing Native People in Philadelphia's Museums: Public Views and Student Reviews(2018-01-17) Bruchac, MargaretMaterial representations of Indigenous history in public museums do more than merely present the past. Exhibitions are always incomplete and idiosyncratic, revealing only a small window into the social worlds of diverse human communities. Museums create, in essence, staged assemblages: compositions of objects, documents, portraits, and other material things that have been filtered through an array of influences. These influences—museological missions, collection processses, curatorial choices, loan possibilities, design concepts, research specialties, funding options, consultant opinions, space limitations, time limits, logistical challenges, etc.—will be unique for each museum and each collection. Taken together, they will inevitably determine which objects are selected for display, what events will take precedence, how cultural interactions will be re-conceptualized, and whose stories will be told.Publication Levi Levering's Headdress: Blurring Borders and Bridging Cultures(2017-12-11) Bruchac, MargaretThe feather headdress labeled 38-2-1 in the Penn Museum Collection is richly colored and composed of many types of materials. It consists of a felt cap with a leather forehead band covered with a panel of vivid loomed beadwork (in orange, blue, yellow, and white tipi shapes) and two beaded rosettes (blue, yellow, white, and red) on either end of the band. Hanging from each side are ear pendants made of buckskin with metal beads attached, and dyed downy feathers and long ribbons trail from the headdress. Extending from the top of the band are felt cylinders (faded perhaps due to light exposure?), red and yellow down feathers, and long turkey feathers topped off with more green and pink down feathers.Publication In Search of the Indian Doctress(1999) Bruchac, MargaretPublication Deep Description and Reflexivity: Methods for Recovering Object Histories(2015-04-01) Bruchac, MargaretThis semester, students in my Anthropology of Museums class learned new methods for analyzing objects in museum collections by using both “deep description” and “object reflexivity.” Students were trained to combine material analysis, ethnographic data, archival research, and critical scholarship to identify and document object histories. They also gained practice in examining methods of construction, curation, and display that reflect the shifting historical relations among Indigenous people and Indigenous objects in museums. As a result, these students generated thoughtful insights that cast new light on old objects in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.Publication The Geology and Cultural History of the Beaver Hill Story(2005-01-01) Bruchac, MargaretThe Pocumtuck story of the "Amiskwôlowôkoiak" -- the people of the beaver-tail hill -- is an example of a "deep-time story" with an "earthshaper" motif. Native stories in this genre describe, in metaphorical terms, using human, super-human, and non-human characters, how ancient geological events reshaped the landscape, forming mountains, rivers, lakes, islands and rocky outcroppings. Many of these stories also describe species evolution and climate change. Native oral narratives about the landscape formed part of a larger body of knowledge that enabled Native people to efficiently hunt, fish, gather and plant, make climate predictions, practice ethnobotany, and situate homesites in the best locations. In this story, there is a remarkable resonance between the familiar results of a beaver building a dam, the ancient history of glacial flooding, the presence of giant beavers in the region during the Pleistocene era, and a mountain that happens to be shaped like a beaver today (Bruchac 2005).Publication The True History of Sally Maminash(1996) Bruchac, MargaretThose who tell her story usually begin with the inscription on a gravestone in the Clapp family plot, in Northampton's Bridge Street Cemetery, that reads: "Sally Maminash. The last of the Indians here. A niece of Occum. A Christian. Died in the family of Warham & Sophia Clap. Jan. 3, 1853. Aged 88." The simple marble sits squarely between similarly shaped stones for Sophia and Warham, in front of three small stones for the Clapp children, and is distinguished only by its inscription.Publication Abenaki Connections to 1704: The Sadoques Family and Deerfield, 2004(2004-01-01) Bruchac, MargaretPublication Of Shells and Ship's Nails(2014-06-01) Bruchac, MargaretThere it lies. In an archaeological collections drawer in the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven, in Connecticut Tier 78, Drawer 4. A single wrought iron nail (perhaps a ship’s nail) rests amidst bits of copper and other metal debris, European trade goods, clay pipe fragments, and a rusty jaw harp, all recovered from a layer of earth four centuries past. This material was salvaged from a dig at Fort Shantok (also called Uncas’s Fort, at Trading Cove), a well-known 17th century Mohegan habitation site, in the homelands of the present-day Mohegan Tribe. At first, this nail is almost too ordinary to notice…but its shape is unusual. This common nail, hammered and drawn from quarter-inch squared iron rod stock (typical of the 17th century) has been re-worked, and the point has been drawn out and narrowed into a tubular shape. Also, the head has been flattened in such a way that it would never hold a wooden seam secure. Who would alter such a good nail? To what purpose?Publication Ladies in fur, Traveling Through Time(2015-01-01) Bruchac, MargaretThe Penn Museum holds a variety of dolls from Arctic environs, including those collected by William Van Valin, George Byron Gordon, Captain George Comer, and the Peary Relief Expedition. Most of the items classified as “dolls” are small wooden figures; only a few represent realistic renditions of Arctic clothing. This Inuit (Eskimo) doll from Greenland (object number 37-14-7) stands out in that she reflects a meticulous level of detail from the minuscule stitching on her kamiks to the precise mode of styling and wrapping her hair to signal marital status. As noted by Monica Fenton in her blog, “The Lady in Furs,” the construction of this doll’s clothing matches the construction of adult Inuit women’s clothing. Who made this doll, and what was her purpose? Her dress is said to represent a married Inuit woman, but does she also represent a specific individual? Whose hair is on her head? How did she make her way to the Museum?Publication Shells & Nails on the Wampum Trail(2015-01-01) Bruchac, MargaretIn May, my research assistants Stephanie Mach and Lise Puyo joined me for field research in the northeastern US and Canada, visiting nine museums, four tribal communities, and several private collectors to examine colonial-era wampum (woven shell bead) belts and collars. (For more details, see our blog, On the Wampum Trail.) Our travels on the wampum trail were charted, in part, by following a track that Frank G. Speck (one of the founders of the Penn Department of Anthropology) laid a century earlier, when he collected examples of visual, ephemeral, and material culture among Algonkian and Iroquoian communities. By creating detailed object cartographies and provenance histories, we hope to recover connections between Indigenous objects in museums and contemporary Indigenous communities.