Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America

Innovative analyses of material culture from northern North America that engage with and illuminate entanglements within global, imperial, and colonial networks.

Beverly Lemire is professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta.Peers Laura :

Laura Peers is professor emerita of museum anthropology, curator emerita (Americas collections), Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, and adjunct professor in the School for the Study of Canada and the Department of Anthropology, Trent University.Whitelaw Anne :

Anne Whitelaw is associate professor of art history at Concordia University.

Beverly Lemire is professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta.

Laura Peers is professor emerita of museum anthropology, curator emerita (Americas collections), Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, and adjunct professor in the School for the Study of Canada and the Department of Anthropology, Trent University.

Anne Whitelaw is associate professor of art history at Concordia University

“[An] impressive collection that will surely impact how scholars think about material culture, collaborative research, and decolonizing the academy for years to come.” HNet

"[T]his book is a feast for the eyes." Material Culture Review/Revue de la culture matérielle

"Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America is without doubt 'a tool for future endeavours' as it sets out to be. Like the objects it analyses, it should circulate widely, across disciplinary borders and social networks beyond museum walls to help guide new methodologies around the study of collections whose diverse contexts—and our understandings of them—continue to change." Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America

“Ultimately, Object Lives and Global Histories provides a broader appreciation of multidisciplinary approaches to Indigenous material cultures. It also encourages scholars, museum workers, and others to delve deep, to engage in slow or concentrated looking and multi-sensory explorations, as well as multi-vocal dialogues—to listen, to learn, and to honour the abundance of knowledges that function outside the walls of the museums, the archives, and institutional frameworks. It offers insights as to how decentre and reframe historical analyses of objects by bringing lives to bear on their existence.” RACAR

“This beautifully produced, well-illustrated collection is an important contribution to thinking about material culture and human networks, bringing together a powerful compilation of scholarship and objects from northern North America. This beautifully produced, well-illustrated collection is an important contribution to thinking about material culture and human networks, bringing together a powerful compilation of scholarship and objects from northern North America. Highly recommended." Choice

"Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America demonstrates how objects can be related to such diverse themes as status, masculinity, imperial and diplomatic relations, craftsmanship, perseverance of Indigenous traditions, cultural hybridity, personal relationships and gift-giving, consumerism, ways of knowing, and health and healing. It is a sustained application of material culture theory to a diverse range of Indigenous material culture that keeps the objects front and centre." Michelle Hamilton, University of Western Ontario