Cara Krmpotich

CURRENT GRANTS 

Recovery and Recuperation: mobilizing the next generation of the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures. Principal Investigator. Canadian Foundation for Innovation/Ontario Research Fund, $200,415. 

Equity, Empathy and Ethics in Digital Heritage Practice and Research. Co-Principal Investigator. University of Toronto/University of Manchester Joint Research Fund, GLAM Incubator, ~$25,000 

Recalibrating Research Impact for Great Lakes Nations. Principal Investigator. Community Partnership Research Program, $45 976. 

Professor Krmpotich partners with the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto, Profs Lynne Howarth and Heather Howard, a team of student researchers and a group of Cree and Anishinaabe seniors on a program called “Memory, Meaning-Making and Collections.” The program provides support to urban aboriginal seniors pursuing their interests in material heritage and cultural histories through artifact handling, heritage site and museum visits, talking circles and crafting opportunities. During its first two years, the program received funding from SSHRC and Canadian Heritage.

With Silvia Forni of the Royal Ontario Museum, and Ciraj Rassool of the University of the Western Cape, she leads a research group spanning Toronto and Cape Town, South Africa that explores the life cycle of political activism in museums. The group includes students, faculty, museum staff and cultural sector staff whose research interests include museums in Nagaland, human rights museology, indigenous museology, food in museums, immigration and multiculturalism, African art histories, and museums as sites of/for political action, among many others.

Professor Krmpotich continues to draw upon and value the relationship with the Haida Repatriation Committee that grew from her doctoral and post-doctoral research. That relationship continues in the form of co-authored publications and presentations on the meanings and values of Haida repatriation, and the place of museums in supporting repatriation.

Museum Studies (MMSt)

Museum and indigenous relations; collections management; repatriation and cultural property; kinship and material culture; community-engaged practice.

In Progress 

2023 Krmpotich, Cara and Alice Stevenson, eds. Collections Management: A Critical  Museum Practice. Under contract with UCL Press. 

Forthcoming  

2022 Museum Anthropology in an Age of Reconciliation. Pragmatism and the New Museum Anthropology, C Hodge and C Kreps, eds. Routledge. 28 pages.   

Books  

2014 The Force of Family: repatriation, kinship, and memory on Haida Gwaii. University of Toronto Press: Toronto. 

2013 Krmpotich, Cara and Laura Peers with the Haida Repatriation Committee and staff of the Pitt Rivers Museum and British Museum. This is Our Life: Haida material heritage and changing museum practice. UBC Press: Vancouver. 

Journal Articles  

2021 Cataloging, Consequences, and Creativity: An Essay in Honor of Lynne C. Howarth. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 59(6): 563-575. 

2016 Public Humanities as Third Space: Memory, meaning-making and collections and the enunciation of “we” in research. University of Toronto Quarterly 85(4): 92-92. 

2016 Krmpotich, Cara and Alexander Somerville. “Affective Presence: The Metonymical Catalogue.” Museum Anthropology 39(2): 178-191. 

2016 Krmpotich, Cara, Heather Howard and Emma Knight. “From collection to community to collections again: urban Indigenous women, material culture and belonging.” Journal of Material Culture 21(3): 343-365. doi: 10.1177/1359183515610362 

2015 Teaching Collections Management Anthropologically. Museum Anthropology 38(2): 112-122. 

Book chapters  

2020 Collison, Jisgang Nika and Cara Krmpotich. Saahlinda Naay, Saving Things House: The Haida Gwaii Museum Past, Present and Future. In The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Repatriation, Cressida Fforde, Tim McKeown, and Honor Keeler, eds, pp. 44-62. London, New York: Routledge. 

2019 The Senses in Museums: Knowledge Production, Democratization and Indigenization. Routledge Handbook of Sensory Archaeology, Joanna Day and Robin Skates, eds, pp. 94-106. London, New York: Routledge. 

2018 Beauty and Belonging. Routledge Handbook of the Anthropology of Beauty, Stephanie Bunn, ed, pp 324-338. London, New York: Routledge. 

Encyclopedia Entries 

2019 Repatriation. Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology, John Jackson, editor. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0234, 17 pages. 

2018 Repatriation: Cultural Property and Human Remains. International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Hilary Callan, editor, Rupert Cox, associate editor. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. 

2021 Hodge, Christine, Cara Krmpotich, Diana Marsh, Ricky Punzalan, Alexandria Rayburn, Sandrena Raymond. A Conversation on Community-led Databases: Surveying Methods of Knowledge Sovereignty. Roundtable, American Anthropological Association, Virtual, November 17-21, 2021. 

2021 Bohaker, Heidi, Glenna Beaucage, Margaret Bruchac, Haley Bryant, Shenella Charles, Bradley Clements, Heather Howard-Bobiwash, Cara Krmpotich, Laura Peers, Judy Pryznowski, Naomi Recollet, Katrina Srigley, and Sheila Wheesk. “Research Alliances: Negotiating and Indigenizing Relationships Across Academic Disciplines, Museums and Indigenous Nations.” Roundtable, NAISA Annual Conference, Virtual, June 14-18, 2021. 

2021 “Unruly Objects: When objects don’t want to be shown in museums,” in conversation with Adam Levine, Curator, Art Gallery of Ontario. June 4, 2021. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDILaTmyHlw  

2019 “Touching the catalogue: toward postcolonial classification and knowledge production.” Invited participant, Best Practices for Collaborating with Members of Source Communities on Museum and Archival Collections, Frankfurt, Oct 7-9, 2019. 

2019 “Scarcity, Dispossession and Salvage: the work of a reconciliation quilt to think these with care.” Invited participant, Museums, Religion and the work of Reconciliation and Remembrance, Berlin, May 9-11, 2019. 

2018 Panelist, TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paiken, episode: “Museums: Repatriation and Ownership”. Co-panelists: Lucy Bell* and Gail Lord. December 3, 2018. https://www.tvo.org/video/museums-repatriation-and-ownership  

2018 Association of Art Museum Curators. Invited “Keynote Dialogue” with Lisa Ackerman, Montreal, PQ, May 5-8, 2018. 

2018 “Missing Truths.” Missing Subjects and the Subjects of Missingness workshop. Centre for Humanities Research (University of the Western Cape) and Jackman Humanities Centre (University of Toronto, Cape Town, SA, February 20-23, 2018. 

2017 “Holding Close and Letting Go: creating collective memory through artifact handling.” Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, ON May 18, 2017.  

2017 “Indigenizing Lifecycles of Museums and Political Activism.” Museums and Public History workshop, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa, February 22-23, 2017. 

2017 Susan Hunter and Cara Krmpotich. “Crafting the Social: Past, Present and Future.” Invited presentation at Woven Communities Symposium, St Andrews, Scotland, January 19-21, 2017.  

2016 “GRASAC and Community Research: The Toronto Friendship Centre Collection” Indigenous Research Methods, Part I: Grounding GRASAC at Cornell. Ithaca NY, April 29 2016. 

MSL 1150-H Collections Management 

MSL 2000-H Curatorial Practice 

MSL 2360-H Museums and Indigenous Communities:  Changing Practices, Changing Relations 

MSL 2370-H Museums and Cultural Heritage: Context and Critical Issues 

MSL 4000-Y Exhibition Projects 

INF 1005/6-H Information Workshop: Cultural Property 

INF 1005/6-H Information Workshop: TRCs, Museums and Archives 

INF 3001 Foundations in Information Studies 

ANT 372-H Cultural Property 

VIC225Y1 History of the World in Objects 

Associate, Victoria College