GALT / GLENBOW EXHIBITION WINS ANTHROPOLOGY AWARD

GALT / GLENBOW EXHIBITION WINS ANTHROPOLOGY AWARD

A recent exhibition that brought five historic Blackfoot artifacts back to Alberta has won a prize from the American Anthropology Association. The exhibition, which loaned five Blackfoot hairlock shirts to Calgary’s Glenbow Museum and the Galt Museum in Lethbridge, won the 2011 Michael M. Ames Prize for Innovative Museum Anthropology for its curators and researchers, from the U.K.’s Pitt Rivers Museum and the University of Aberdeen. The shirts, nearly 200 years old, were originally collected in traditional Blackfoot territory, in what became Alberta, by George Simpson, then governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. They had been given to his secretary, Edward Hopkins. Made with traditional methods and materials — elk and deer hide, porcupine quills, and horse and human hair adornments, they’ve been in the collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University since 1893.