LACOL Digital Humanities 2023
Nahom Ayalew, Jesse Koblin, Kalea Ramsey, Bernard Wongibe
Research Question Answer / Change Over Time
From our investigation of the Parrish papers through text analysis and exploratory data visualization, our group has concluded that Parrish’s role was that of an unbiased, impartial intermediary. Despite being kidnapped and growing up enmeshed within Native American culture, the language and diction of the Parrish papers seem to betray no partisan sway in his mediation of U.S.–Native negotiations. Even in private correspondence written to and from him by friends, no language explicitly reveals a partial attitude towards either U.S. or Indigenous peoples.
However, our research priorities have changed over time. Rather than a granular text analysis of the Jasper Parrish Papers only accounting for one institution, our focus has shifted to a trans-institutional meta-analysis of archival and museum representation of Native American cultural artifacts. Collegiate institutions as well as their library collections and museums are major incubators for minoritized cultures, thorough documentation preserving their posterity within history. Thus, the occlusion and proportional underrepresentation of Native American cultures we noticed across Vassar, Amherst, and Williams’ archives and museums was glaring. Seeing as our home institutions are founded upon Nonotuck, Munsee-Lenape, and Stockbridge-Munsee land respectively, they are indebted to do justice to Native American cultures through archival inclusion uplifting unheard narratives. Further miscarriages of justice, such as Vassar’s NAGPRA-violating illegal storage of Native American remains, show Native American artifacts have yet to receive the institutional support they deserve.
Our trans-institutional meta-analysis involved gathering, cleaning, and visualizing museum data from our home institutions (as well as fleshing out our transcription and analysis of the Jasper Parrish Papers) to ascertain both broad and singular trends in Native American archival representation. By working with both big and smart data, we can better understand how minoritized groups are represented across object metadata and within the content of objects themselves.
Evidence for our Answer. How did the DH tools/methods help you achieve that answer and where did they hinder you? What other methods might be needed to fully comprehend this answer?
Jasper Parrish Papers
The Parrish Papers’ Collocations chart for the string “parrish” supports our unbiased interpretation of Parrish’s character. The words “U.S.” and “Native” are mentioned in reference to him a comparable amount of times, he is called with the title “friend” and brother” both by U.S. and Native writers, and his associated title “agent” is neutral, betraying his employment under the U.S. Military and nothing more. Rather than being driven into U.S. patriotism or Indigenous support due to his kidnapping and Munsee enculturation, Parrish’s captive upbringing seemingly endowed him with sensitivity towards Indigenous peoples and amiability towards interpretation for the Iroquois Six Nations tribes.
An undercurrent that emerged within our analysis of the Jasper Parrish Papers was the lack of substantive representation of Native American peoples, especially from Native American perspectives. Despite the Jasper Parrish Papers being the Vassar College Digital Library’s only organized collection of primary sources pertaining to Native American culture, only 21 of the Papers’ 123 documents directly concern Native American peoples and their concerns. Parrish’s life is extraordinary because of his relationship to Indigenous peoples and unique upbringing, yet this aspect of his life is diminished under a huge volume of texts concerning personal affairs.
Equally, that the Vassar College Digital Library’s only Native American collection is primarily rendered through the viewpoint of white settlers and U.S. military representatives is a massive erasure of Native American voices. As evidenced in the Cirrus, the documents written by U.S. representatives are deeply paternalistic and patronizing, with the U.S. President and Secretary of War referred to as “Father” of the Native American peoples. Documents written by Native Americans, such as the Report from the Tuscarora Indians and Message from the Six Nations to the Secretary of War portray Native peoples as destitute and uncivilized, or requiring reparations.
No documents portray Native Americans as independent, powerful, or cultural equals to white people. Such a deficit not only in the number of Native American documents but also the content of those available indicates a serious under-representation and misrepresentation of Indigenous peoples institutionally.
Metadata Analysis
We created a dataset of 98 Native American objects across the collections of three institutions (Amherst, Vassar, and Williams College). For the 86 museum objects, we acquired exports of the most recent museum datasets and selected the objects that are labeled in maker culture as Native American. We then manually assigned coordinates to specific tribes in maker culture to ensure accuracy. For the 12 archive objects, we used a subset of each institution’s collection of Native American objects, compiled all of their metadata into a text file, ran the Named Entity Recognition function on Recogito and extracted geography-related words, then geocoded these words to assign them coordinates for mapping. The goal of visualizing this dataset in Tableau is to perform an institutional comparison on the accession, documentation, and locations associated with the Native American objects in collections. Through our visualizations, we hope to reveal trends, provide a reflective analysis of our institutional history, and investigate the roles our colleges play in promoting equity.
- Map of locations relevant to Native American Objects in the Archives and Museums of Amherst, Vassar, and Williams College. It reveals the focus region for each institution’s collection.
Zoomed in details for each institution:
Amherst: this view shows locations of travel in the Frederic Brewster Loomis (AC 1896) Papers
Vassar: this view shows locations mentioned in the Jasper Parrish Papers.
Williams: this view shows locations mentioned by multiple archive documents on U.S government communication and treaties with the Native American tribes in the mid-19th century.
- Map and list of tribes mentioned Native American Objects in the Archives and Museums of Amherst, Vassar, and Williams College. Out of 98 objects, only 40 contain metadata information of associated tribes, and there are 20 tribes identified. The size of the circles indicate the number of objects associated with this tribe, and the top ones are Navajo (9) and Iroquois (5).
3. Trend of Accession and Credit Type of Native American Objects in the Museum of Amherst, Vassar, and Williams College. This line graph shows that out of the three institutions, Amherst has the longest and most consistent accession record for Native American objects through bequests, gifts, and purchase. Vassar’s collection is composed entirely of gifts, and Willam’s collection are all found and cataloged in 1993-4.
An acknowledgment of the various theoretical approaches to your method and how your project relies on them – or not.
Our group has attempted to merge macro/micro and locative investigation theoretical approaches through textual analysis and geospatial visualization. By locating Indigenous civilizations on explanatory maps and delving deep into the texts that contextualize and expand the history behind some of these places, we have aimed to create a project that explores multiple dimensions of inquiry. Similarly, our theoretical approach is, first and foremost, predicated upon data feminism principles. When tasked with researching Native American documents and objects, our team exercised the utmost reflexivity and cultural care in doing justice to our writing and research topics. Often, histories of marginalization and violence disappear within data cleaning and the movement of text to data. Through the aforementioned locative investigation, we have tried to highlight as many aspects of Native American minoritization in historical America and the archives as possible.
How your project addresses the issues of social justice raised in our readings, in discussion, or your own awareness of issues on your campuses?
Prior to mapping, we attempted to use geocoding functions to automatically assign coordinates to the locations in our dataset. However, the locations of specific Native American tribes or territories were either not detected by the function or were assigned incorrect coordinates. We eventually decided to manually check every coordinate. Our project reveals the larger problem of the lack of recognition of these places’ historical and cultural significance, as well as data bias and inequality in other projects with topics similar to ours. It means that Name Entity Recognition models, geocoding functions, and general maps should expand their recognition and inclusion of non-mainstream, historically significant locations, such as those pertaining to indigenous populations.
