This project collaborates with Waganakising Odawak (the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians) to build a digital portal pilot for Waganakising heritage. The Waganakising Odawak, located in Michigan, are leaders in encouraging positive relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people while preserving their culture and advancing their self-sufficiency. The key partner for this project is the Waganakising Tribal Repatriation, Archives and Records Department, headed by Eric Hemenway, and located in Harbor Springs, Michigan. As a Tribal-governed platform, the portal will be curated by Indigenous historians, makers, and other knowledge-holders of the Tribe.
This portal, and the process of its creation, will initially focus on porcupine quillwork traditions and align with Waganakising initiatives supporting historical and traditional arts knowledge while cultivating intercultural respect and understanding. Waganakising porcupine quillwork is a beautiful decorative art but is also a significant and profound cultural practice representing Waganakising history, Tribal sovereignty, and environmental conservation. This art embodies the respectful relationships between the human and non-human world which are interwoven in Waganakising oral traditions and storytelling.
This digital portal is built upon the Mukurtu Content Management System. Mukurtu provides a number of features including:
- Local cultural protocols to provide granular access parameters for digital heritage content.
- Traditional knowledge fields customizable for curating content alongside standard Dublin Core metadata fields.
- An innovative set of Traditional Knowledge licenses that work with traditional copyright and Creative Commons licenses to better serve Indigenous needs.
- A safe, secure, free and open source platform for managing digital cultural heritage materials online and offline.
Mukurtu is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (or "GPL"), which means anyone is free to download it and share it with others. This open development model means that people are constantly working to make sure Mukurtu is a cutting-edge platform that supports the unique needs of indigenous libraries, archives and museums as they seek to preserve and share their digital heritage. Mukurtu encourages collaboration and innovation as we seek to offer respectful and responsible models for content management.