My research focuses on various aspects of First Nations visual art and material culture, media, and performance on the Northwest Coast of North America, both historically and today. Themes recurring in my work include colonialism and Indigenous modernities, cultural brokerage and translation, the politics of intercultural exchange and display, discourses of tradition and heritage management, history of anthropology and museums, and cultural and intellectual property. Previous research and film projects have examined the intercultural history of totem poles; ethnographic mediation of the Hamat’sa or “Cannibal Dance” of the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw (Kwakiutl) of British Columbia; and Edward Curtis’s 1914 silent melodrama, In the Land of the Head Hunters. I have curated two exhibits for the Bard Graduate Center Focus Gallery: Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (2011); and The Story Box: Franz Boas, George Hunt and the Making of Anthropology (2019), the latter in partnership with U’mista Cultural Centre. I am currently co-director of a major collaborative project to create a critical, annotated edition—in print and digital media—of Franz Boas’s landmark 1897 monograph on Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw culture.
“Emergent Digital Networks: Museum Collections and Indigenous Knowledge in the Digital Era” (co-authored with Kate Hennessy). In Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 1, edited by Igor Krupnik, 165-181. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2022.
“For the Lives of Things: Indigenous Ontologies of Active Matter.” In Conserving Active Matter, edited by Peter Miller and Soon Kai Poh, 221-33. New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2022.
Writing the Hamat’sa: Ethnography, Colonialism, and the Cannibal Dance. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2021.
Editor, with Brad Evans, Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtish, the Kwakwaka’wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014.
“Indigenous Ontologies, Digital Futures: Plural Provenances and the Kwakwaka’wakw collection in Berlin and Beyond.” In Museum as Process: Translating Local and Global Knowledges, edited by Raymond Silverman, 19-44. London: Routledge, 2015.
Editor, Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast. New York: Bard Graduate Center for Decorative Art, Design History, Material Culture; Distributed by Yale University Press, 2011.
Author,
with Aldona Jonaitis, The Totem Pole: An
Intercultural History. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010.
“A Cannibal in the Archive: Performance, materiality, and (in)visibility in unpublished Edward Curtis photographs of the Hamat’sa.” Visual Anthropology Review 25 (2) (2009): 128-49.
“Frozen Poses: Hamat’sa dioramas, recursive representation, and the making of a Kwakwaka’wakw icon.” In Photography, Anthropology, and History: Expanding the Frame, edited by Christopher Morton and Elizabeth Edwards, 89-116. London: Ashgate Press, 2009.
“Crests on Cotton: ‘Souvenir’ T-shirts and the materiality of remembrance among the Kwakwaka’wakw of British Columbia.” Museum Anthropology 31(1) (2008), 1-18.
481 Unsettling Things: Expanding Conversations in Studies of the Material World
730 The Social Lives of Things: The Anthropology of Art and Material Culture
740 Native Arts of the Northwest Coast
795 Exhibiting Culture/s: Anthropology In and Of the Museum
863 Objects of Colonial Encounter
877 Picturing Things: Photography as Material Culture
882 Ethnography and the Material World
922 In the Footsteps of Franz Boas: Native Arts of the North Pacific and the Legacy of the Jesup Expedition
