Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America explores how close, collaborative looking can discern the traces of contact, exchange, and movement of objects and give them a life and political power in complex cross-cultural histories. Red River coats, prints of colonial places and peoples, Indigenous-made dolls, and an Englishwoman's collection provide case studies of art and material culture that correct and give nuance to global and imperial histories. The result of a collaborative research process involving Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors, this book looks closely at the circumstances of making, use, and circulation of these objects: things that supported and defined both Indigenous resistance and colonial and imperial purposes. Contributors re-envision the histories of northern North America by focusing on the lives of things flowing to and from this vast region between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, showing how material culture is a critical link that tied this diverse landscape to the wider world. An original perspective on the history of northern North American peoples grounded in things, Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America provides a key analytical and methodological lens that exposes the complexity of cultural encounters and connections between local and global communities.

Innovative analyses of material culture from northern North America that engage with and illuminate entanglements within global, imperial, and colonial networks.

About the Author

Beverly Lemire is professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta.

Laura Peers is professor emerita of museum anthropology, curator emerita (Americas collections), Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, and adjunct professor in the School for the Study of Canada and the Department of Anthropology, Trent University.

Anne Whitelaw is associate professor of art history at Concordia University

Reviews

"Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America demonstrates how objects can be related to such diverse themes as status, masculinity, imperial and diplomatic relations, craftsmanship, perseverance of Indigenous traditions, cultural hybridity, personal relationships and gift-giving, consumerism, ways of knowing, and health and healing. It is a sustained application of material culture theory to a diverse range of Indigenous material culture that keeps the objects front and centre." Michelle Hamilton, University of Western Ontario

"Ultimately, Object Lives and Global Histories provides a broader appreciation of multidisciplinary approaches to Indigenous material cultures. It also encourages scholars, museum workers, and others to delve deep, to engage in slow or concentrated looking and multi-sensory explorations, as well as multi-vocal dialogues-to listen, to learn, and to honour the abundance of knowledges that function outside the walls of the museums, the archives, and institutional frameworks. It offers insights as to how decentre and reframe historical analyses of objects by bringing lives to bear on their existence." RACAR

"Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America is without doubt 'a tool for future endeavours' as it sets out to be. Like the objects it analyses, it should circulate widely, across disciplinary borders and social networks beyond museum walls to help guide new methodologies around the study of collections whose diverse contexts-and our understandings of them-continue to change." Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America

"[T]his book is a feast for the eyes." Material Culture Review/Revue de la culture materielle

"[An] impressive collection that will surely impact how scholars think about material culture, collaborative research, and decolonizing the academy for years to come." HNet

Awards
Winner of the Bard Graduate Center 2022 Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize.



Book Information
ISBN 9780228003991
Author Beverly Lemire
Format Paperback
Page Count 560
Imprint McGill-Queen's University Press
Publisher McGill-Queen's University Press