The Nunalleq Digital Museum

The Nunalleq Digital Museum (www.nunalleq.org), which launched in 2023, features an exhibition presenting a shared narrative between archaeological and local knowledge that organically links past and present Yup'ik lifeways and traditions. More than 6000 objects, labelled both in Yugtun (the Yup'ik language) and English, are in the catalogue. The website is hosted by the University of Aberdeen, with restricted-access archiving of content at the University of Dundee, to ensure its longevity and maintenance. It was agreed that the village board of the Native Village of Quinhagak, as rights holders for the artefacts represented in the 3D scans, would decide governance procedures for publication of data outside the Digital Museum to ensure culturally appropriate reuse.

The authors of this article were members of the core project team, which was balanced between archaeologists and local Yup'ik expertise. Building on the Educational Resource (Watterson & Hillerdal Reference Watterson and Hillerdal2020), launched in 2019, the team learned that successful co-curation does not happen simply by inviting everyone to participate. Rather, it requires the creation of equitable spaces for collaboration which bring balance to various types of knowledge and different ways of engaging with artefacts. Art-based workshops focusing on drum-making, hunting equipment, clothing and dance-fans were held between 2022 and 2023. Led by invited culture-bearers or Elders, workshops were open to everyone and attracted a broad age range. Workshops provide a tangible connection to the Nunalleq material, creating a forum for co-production of new knowledge through the learning and lived experiences of participants as they made their own cultural objects inspired by the past (Figure 1). These workshops together with one-on-one sessions with local Elders, culture-bearers and artists were recorded for inclusion as short-film, photo-story and sound-bite content.

Figure 1.

The archaeological material inspires arts-based workshops (figure by Alice Watterson, Stephan Jones, Rick Knecht & Anna Mossolova).

The digital exhibition is a practice-based design response to Smith's (Reference Smith2012) assertion that Indigenous peoples should recognise themselves in representations of their heritage. The exhibition's homepage is a panoramic view of the area incorporating Nunalleq and Quinhagak (Figure 2). Users can click to change subsistence seasons and, as the background cycles from summer to autumn, winter and spring, different themed pages with reconstructions of life at Nunalleq become available. The reconstruction paintings are based on places in the local landscape and were created through a collaborative process whereby Jacqueline Nalikutaar Cleveland (Yup'ik photographer and videographer) curated photographs for Alice Watterson (archaeologist and artist/designer) to use as reference (Figure 3). This informed the reconstruction artworks from a local perspective, which we hope gives our Yup'ik audience a sense of familiarity that in turn affords a feeling of ownership over the outcome. For our non-local audience, we equally wanted to convey a strong sense of place and experience of the Yup'ik homeland.

Figure 2.

The Digital Museum home-screen (figure by Alice Watterson).

Figure 3.

Watterson's reconstruction artwork beside photographs curated by Cleveland (figure by Alice Watterson & Jacquiline Nalikutaar Cleveland).

The Nunalleq assemblage was recovered from a dwelling but reveals an active narrative of a site dispersed in the landscape. We chose the page themes from topics that resonated with the Yup'ik community and their active subsistence lifeways—for example hunting, fishing, grass weaving and oral histories—and also topics that hit key ‘story points’ from the archaeological findings, such as social hierarchy, dietary reconstruction, and play and learning for children at Nunalleq.

King (Reference King2017) states that there is simply no ‘blanket solution’ to Indigenous museum sovereignty and we agree that each museum, collection and community should be afforded the space to explore their own pathway towards self-representation. A core dimension of ‘Indigenising’ museum work involves a fundamental shift in curatorial power dynamics (Peers & Brown Reference Peers and Brown2003). Our approach to co-curation for the Digital Museum was therefore adaptable and responsive by design. Much of the interactive content was designed in response to interviews and workshops. For example, relevant soundbites from interviews were paired where possible with artefacts from the collection identified as being of particular interest to the interviewee—a simple but effective pathway towards co-curation, particularly for members of the community unfamiliar with collections work. Additionally, ‘exploding’ and animated 3D models were designed to complement some of the community-curated content by visually illustrating observations made by the interviewee or workshop leader (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Co-curated content in the Digital Museum (figure by Alice Watterson).

This responsive design aimed to build content around topics and experiences important to the Nunalleq archaeological narrative, while also being relevant and meaningful to the community today. This approach ensured that the community led the choice of artefacts for exhibition. There were no artefacts that the rightsholder community did not want displayed online, but we acknowledge that Yup'ik communities elsewhere may have elected not to display certain objects. This is something we remain aware of and will address if the issue is raised in the future.

Specific words and phrases in the exhibition were translated to Yugtun and can be clicked to play a pop-up soundbite for pronunciation where users can launch a Yugtun sentence builder (www.yugtun.com) developed by Lonny Alaskuk Strunk and Christopher Egalaaq Liu. Further integration of the Yugtun language is a priority and we are working to develop this in updates to the Digital Museum.