2023 Annual Report Update: Reimagining New England Histories

In 2022–2023, Allyson LaForge, supported by the Simmons Center, led key efforts to inventory 10,000 cultural Belongings at the Tomaquag Museum. She helped adapt the museum’s cataloging system to reflect Indigenous knowledge systems, laying the groundwork for a major move and future use of Traditional Knowledge Labels.

During this past academic year, the Simmons Center enabled me to continue working at the Tomaquag Museum, Rhode Island’s only Indigenous-led museum, located in Exeter. In the coming years, the Tomaquag Museum will be moving to a new location and storage facility adjacent to the campus of the University of Rhode Island. When I arrived at the museum in 2019, the majority of the collections were not formally inventoried, meaning they did not have photographs, location data, descriptions, or IDs. Without an inventory, keeping track of the collections during this move would not be possible. Beginning in 2021, I worked with interns from URI, Mystic Seaport, and Brown University to oversee and complete a formal inventory of the museum’s 10,000 cultural Belongings. With the help of Bridget Hall (A.M. in Public Humanities 2023, Brown University), I finalized this inventory in December 2022 and began the second stage of the project, which aims to enter the inventory data into the museum’s collections management system, PastPerfect.

Preparing for this data conversion required many hours of work, which included research on multiple Belongings in the collection to ensure their descriptions reflected their provenance as well as Indigenous knowledge about them. In most museums, collections are categorized using nomenclature systems that organize objects according to hierarchies. This nomenclature does not work for an Indigenous-led museum, as it does not reflect Indigenous knowledge about cultural Belongings as connected to people and other Belongings in the past, present, and future. In addition to data cleanup, we worked towards updating the PastPerfect nomenclature lexicon to reflect Indigenous categories for cultural Belongings, rather than Western hierarchies. While imperfect, this project has allowed us to create the foundation for future processes at the museum, such as creating and applying Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels. With the help of Reimagining New England Histories interns from Mystic Seaport, we are now on track for the full inventory to be uploaded into PastPerfect in September 2023, right in time for the upcoming collections move.