GRASAC was established in 2005 and can best be thought of as two related things: a network of people who meet, work together, and share ideas to learn about the histories, languages and cultures of the Great Lakes, as well as a database that digitally reunites Great Lakes materials from around the world, putting heritage items back into relationships with each other and with community members, teachers, researchers, and heritage staff.

Great Lakes heritage continues to be scattered across museums and archives in North America and Europe, often at a great distance from Indigenous community knowledge, memory and perspectives.

GRASAC seeks to benefit Indigenous communities and cultural institutions alike by bringing together members’ insights and knowledge from their own areas of understanding and inspiring multiple ways of knowing, recording, representing and supporting Great Lakes cultural practices.

We strive to model mutually supportive relationships among Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in our research ethics and methods, governance, funding, leadership and mentoring. We use both Indigenous and Western approaches to recover and incorporate distinctive Indigenous traditions of thought and knowledge into our understandings.

We respect communities’ sovereignty to pursue physical repatriation as they desire and to set the terms for sharing intellectual property and traditional knowledge. GRASAC has sought to foster a community of researchers and lifelong-learners who can, in this context, facilitate digital and knowledge repatriation, and work in ways that contribute to the understanding of and continuation of Great Lakes arts and cultures.

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For more details on GRASAC’s history and mandate please refer to the articles posted in our Resources section.

About this website

This website is the public face of GRASAC. Here we present digital exhibits of material based on the combined knowledge of GRASAC’s contributing scholars and community researchers, and the records of host institutions.  This public website was launched in June of 2014 with four exhibits curated by Crystal Migwans, a member of M'Chigeeng First Nation who is currently a doctoral student in Art History at Columbia University.  New exhibits will be added in time. We hope that this website will become a resource for students of all ages wanting to learn more about the stunning art and rich histories of the Great Lakes region.

History and People

GRASAC was founded in 2004 by Ruth Phillips (Canada Research Chair, Department of Art History, Carleton University), Heidi Bohaker (Department of History, University of Toronto) and Darlene Johnston (Chippewas of Nawash First Nation and Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia). They invited Alan Corbiere (M’Chigeeng First Nation and Anishinaabemowin Revitalization Program Coordinator at Lakeview School in M’Chigeeng) and John Borrows (Chippewas of Nawash First Nation and Faculty of Law, University of Victoria) to work with them on grant proposals to secure funding so that GRASAC could become a reality. Professor Cory Willmott in the Department of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville has been a key technical adviser and collaborator from the beginning. Since 2010, Dr. Kate Higginson has been the GRASAC Research Coordinator based at Carleton University.

Funding

GRASAC gratefully acknowledges the funding assistance of the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Province of Ontario, the British Academy and other sources. We are thankful also for the cooperation of the many institutions that have contributed their photos and records to this project.

Both the GKS research database and this public website were initially developed by idéeclic of Gatineau, QC, when updated and maintained by Vic Tar E-Mail him (will open email client). We are grateful for their many in-kind contributions.