Projects

Mukurtu: an indigenous archive and content management tool

Mukurtu (MOOK-oo-too ) is a free and open source community archive platform that provides a standards-based, content management system adaptable to the local cultural protocols and intellectual property rights systems of Indigenous communities. Mukurtu began in 2007 as a community archive project with the Warumungu community. The word "mukurtu" means "dilly bag" in Warumungu and was chosen by Warumungu elders to name the system designating it as a "safe keeping place." Mukurtu, a community archive, like the dilly bag, preserves cultural materials and is accessible based on a reciprocal system of respect and obligations to continue to maintain, create and circulate the materials and knowledge in responsible and respectful ways.

Plateau Peoples' Web Portal: a multi-tribal digital archive

The Plateau Peoples' Web Portal is a collaborative digital curation and multi-tribal archive project between Washington State University's Libraries, Plateau Center for American Indian Studies, the Museum of Anthropology, the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum of the American Indian, Yakama Indian Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and the Coeur d’Alene Tribe. The Portal allows tribal representatives and scholars add content, metadata and audio, video and text comments to individual items and collections. The portal highlights Native knowledge through the tribal knowledge fields allowing tribes to narrate their cultural materials.

Digital Dynamics Across Cultures: translating indigenous property systems

Digital Dynamics Across Cultures is designed to make Warumungu cultural protocols for the distribution, reproduction and creation of knowledge the primary logic of Internet search. By presenting "content" through a set of Warumungu cultural protocols that both limit and enhance the exchange, distribution and creation of knowledge, the site's internal logic challenges default notions about knowledge sharing and access. As users navigate through the site, they will encounter the protocols that limit, define and account for a dynamic and multiply-produced understanding of knowledge distribution and reproduction.

Digital Return: a research network and online resource

Digital Return is a research network and online resource providing a place for dialogue and connection and direct links to people and projects related to the return of cultural and linguistic materials to Indigenous communities globally. Over the last twenty years as digital technologies have grown and collecting institutions have embarked on repatriation projects, the return of digital collections to source communities has become more commonplace. These projects, however, are as diverse as the communities who undertake them. Digital Return is an evolving site to catalogue these projects, provide information to source communities and to highlight divergent ways to manage digital heritage collections and resources.