The Boas/Hunt 1897 Critical Edition Project

CHAPTER XI: BEHIND THE SCENES

The Franz Boas/George Hunt
1897 Critical Edition Project

“A large part of our history wouldn’t be there… if it wasn’t for George Hunt and Franz Boas”
—Chief William T. Cranmer, 2018

This exhibition contributes to an international collaboration, the purpose of which is to produce a new annotated edition of the 1897 book in both print and digital media. The Critical Edition will reunite widely distributed collections with the original text and with the Kwakwaka’wakw families whose cultural heritage they represent. It will provide critical insight into the history of anthropology and recover long dormant ethnographic records for Indigenous use in the present and future. At both levels, the Critical Edition will help fulfill Boas and Hunt’s vision for their own life-long efforts.

The 1897 Critical Edition Project Team

Since 2012, the 1897 Critical Edition project team has been scouring global museums, libraries, and archives for materials that went into producing the book or were subsequently connected to it (see map). The project is based at Bard Graduate Center, University of Victoria, and U’mista Cultural Centre, and has been generously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the School for Advanced Research.

Boas 1897 project team at the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, NM, 2016. Left to right: Corrine Hunt, William Cranmer, Judith Berman, Sarah Holland, Rainer Hatoum, Andy Everson, Aaron Glass, Ira Jacknis. Courtesy of SAR.

Corrine Hunt studying her great-grandmother Lucy Hunt’s Killer-whale transformation mask at the Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin, Germany, 2018. Courtesy of Corrine Hunt.

Alfred “Hutch” Hunt and Lily Alfred examining Boas 1897 project materials, Fort Rupert, BC, 2016. Photograph by Marina Dodis.

Exhibit curator Aaron Glass browsing Boas photos from 1894 at the American Museum of Natural History Library, New York, NY, 2017. Photograph by Corrine Hunt.

Cedar-bark head and neck rings in storage at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Suitland, MD, during a project team study visit, 2017. Left to right: Rainer Hatoum, Corrine Hunt, Donna Cranmer, Andy Everson, Aaron Glass. Photograph by Erin Brillon.

An original collection tag on a cedar-bark neck ring featuring notes by George Hunt, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 2017. Photographed by Aaron Glass.

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2019-06-17T17:00:44+00:00
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