At the Université de Montréal, a project team led by Assistant Professor Kevin Péloquin recently worked to bring the cultural knowledge and voices of the Indigenous community to an anthropological collection at the university. UMontréal’s ethnographic collection includes 500 items that are Indigenous cultural property from the Atikamekw, Innu, and Inuit communities. Cultural experts from each of these Indigenous communities visited the collection and took part in video interviews, where they shared information and recounted memories of the objects. In addition to publishing the interviews online for the general public’s use, the university has integrated the interviews into geography and history teaching courses to help education students learn how to teach the perspectives, knowledge, and skills of Indigenous peoples when they begin their careers in elementary and secondary schools. Péloquin hopes to obtain funding to produce full English translations of the videos.
