Pictured: “Bert Fremont and Family”, 1910s.
Nebraska State Historical Society Photograph Collections.
W.L. Jacobs. Click image for a larger view.
A wolf-skin shirt, a buffalo-horn spoon, and
a tipi covering are among the 685 Omaha Indian artifacts located,
photographed, and published on the Omaha Virtual Museum Web
site (http://omahatribe.unl.edu).
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) project was supported
by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)
under a National Leadership Grant.
“We did this for the children,”
said Dennis Hastings, MA, founder and director of the Omaha
Tribal Historical Research Project, Inc., member of the Omaha
tribe, and one of the project originators. “We’re
experimenting with this new media to try to maintain our culture.
It helps us to communicate with tribal people and to educate
people throughout the world,” Hastings said. The Omaha
are the only Native American tribe left in Nebraska who lived
there before Europeans arrived in North America.
In addition to the artifacts, the museum includes
339 pages of important texts on Omaha Indian culture and 50
photographs that are held in museums in Germany, France, England,
Switzerland, and the U.S. The Web site also includes 363 artifacts
and related text from other tribes for comparative studies.
For Thomas P. Myers, Ph.D., a UNL professor
of anthropology and project director, the impetus for the
project grew out of his frustration with the wide dispersal
of artifacts necessary to his research. During the first phase
of the grant, he identified the location of the artifacts
and selected the most representative examples.
UNL Libraries, which has significant experience
in cataloging images and creating web accessible databases,
and the UN State Museum, which houses some important Omaha
artifacts, took on the project after Myers retired following
the grant’s first phase. The Nebraska State Historical
Society was a key project partner. Its assets include Omaha
artifacts in the Museum of Nebraska History, Omaha photographic
images in the Library and Archives, and a state-of-the art
digitization lab.
“We were careful to include only Omaha
artifacts. This was difficult because there was so much influence
from other tribes,” said Dee Ann Allison, MLS, UNL Computing
Operations and Research Services and the project’s co-principal
investigator.
Allison, who worked on the Web site for four
years, created and embedded into the texts graphic images
that help people to pronounce words in the Omaha language.
She also standardized the photographs to make it easier to
adjust to future technological changes.
Visits to the Web site have increased by 50
percent every year since its September 2005 launch. The virtual
museum is being used most by students at the Nebraska Indian
Community College, Hastings said. All parts of the site are
being visited, with the most popular parts varying between
the database, the digital texts, and the photos.
Based on the results of a user survey, Allison
and Hastings are working to enhance the Web site, add content,
and provide more information from the Indian perspective.
“The whole effort is ongoing. We’re
keeping up with information and communicating,” Hastings
said. “Someone at a powwow in New Mexico said they’d
heard about our website. We felt very proud of it because
we’re doing something for our culture. If other tribes
want to do something like this, so much the better.”
|