Books have long served as spaces for Indigenous and settler colonial encounters. This area focuses on the book and book-adjacent objects created, used, and cared for by Indigenous artists and craftspeople in the Great Lakes and Eastern Woodlands regions of North America, including birchbark books, wampum, and hybrid books (with Indigenous and settler colonial aspects) in North American and European collections. Hidden Stories begins locally, where the project is co-located, connecting with Anishinabek collaborators in and around Toronto, Ontario, and Lunaapeew (Delaware) community members, whose homelands are located in and around Princeton, New Jersey. To learn more about the traditional lands on which the Hidden Stories project sits, see The Land We Work On.

The project works in the following key areas:

Community-Relations Building: At its foundation, the Hidden Stories project is community-led and has developed slowly through conversations and relations-building with Indigenous collaborators. Collaborative work grows out of connections established over time. Research activities are community-directed and include connecting with items held in institutional collections, developing long-term conversations that link communities with the institutions where Indigenous belongings are held. 

Community Access to Indigenous Belongings: What are the challenges facing Indigenous communities seeking access to their belongings held by settler colonial institutions? How can paths of access be improved, both in person and digitally? Do Indigenous communities want these items to be digitised and shared? If so, how can Indigenous scholars and knowledge keepers best collaborate with libraries to improve descriptive data and increase community access to their belongings in institutional collections? Who owns the data, and what issues are raised by this research with regard to data sovereignty?

Provenance Research: As a whole, the work of Hidden Stories includes research on “provenance”: that is, the history of who created and used these items, where these items were housed, and in what company. These ‘biographies’ tell the stories of the lives of Indigenous belongings — how they were extracted from their communities, where they have travelled, how they have been handled and stored over time. Many Indigenous belongings are held in North American and European collections, with little or no provenance information. This project seeks to improve provenance history of Indigenous belongings in order to reconnect them to their home communities, wherever possible.  

Traditional Care Practices: Indigenous belongings are often viewed as living ancestors, more-than-human relations, community members. Viewed from this perspective, regarding these belongings as simply inert objects stored within institutions, far away from their communities, is similar to having an ancestor unwillingly held at a distance from their relatives, deprived of the care necessary to keep it healthy and well, and away from the rituals required to honor it and keep it connected to its human family. How are Indigenous belongings held and cared for in community over generations? How are they stored and cared for (or neglected) in institutional collections? The project works to connect belongings to their community of origin, as well as to increase access (virtual and in person) by community members to their belongings held within institutions in North America and Europe. These human, more-than-human, and institutional connections will continue to develop as the stories of these belongings unfold.