Our team has mobilized toward a comprehensive final product through collaborative thinking, asynchronous communication, and correspondence with archivists and librarians at our home institutions. Our team is committed to creating a project which sheds light on Native and Indigenous archival representation within the broader contextual framework of race, migration, and marginalization.
After my teammate and I contacted college historians and librarians from our respective institutions, we discovered that Vassar and Amherst’s Digital Libraries contain dedicated Native American special collections. Additionally, Williams offers the massive WCMA museum collection as a robust object selection resource, providing ample data extraction sources. I specifically have honed in on source documentation and close analysis of our selected objects, delving deep into a textual analysis of our project’s themes. I commenced by contacting the assistant registrar for Vassar’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center Collections and requested a dataset containing the accession date, creation date, and origin of the museum’s Native American objects. This information will allow our team to perform extensive data parsing and explanatory visualizations using metadata categories that illuminate the nature of the objects represented.
My work has primarily involved transcribing selected objects from the Jasper Parrish Papers, a collection of correspondence and legal papers on the life of the 19th-century U.S. Army interpreter Jasper Parrish. Having been captured by the New York Munsee tribe and enculturated into their language and customs, Parrish eventually returned to his parents, gaining cultural and linguistic familiarity with Native American life. He later became an interpreter who decoded conflicts, diplomacy, and land disputes between the U.S. government and Six Nations tribes. Studying Parrish’s unique and incredible life through Vassar’s digitized manuscripts has been revelatory. Although it is sometimes challenging to read cursive lettering and outdated vernacular, through these materials, I have become more familiar with the narrative of Parrish’s life and the historical complexities of U.S. Government-Native relations. I have performed preliminary visualizations of these transcripts using Voyant and uncovered trends and common vocabulary across these texts.
Moreover, I’ve also pulled pertinent metadata (creator, creation date, accession date) from these digitized objects and added them to an Excel dataset, which I plan to examine further using OpenRefine’s faceting tools. Through big-data quantitative analysis with museum datasets and smart-data transcriptions of library objects, our team hopes to better understand historical Native American culture and artifacts at both broad and nuanced scales. Our team has agreed that a comprehensive understanding of North American Indigeneity necessitates an analysis of its data to assess vast trends and close reading of anecdotal narratives to understand Indigenous perspectives empathically.
