Ephemeral Encounters: Reflections on Representing Jefferson and Native America at the American Philosophical Society

Margaret M. Bruchac (Abenaki) is an ethnographer, historian, and museum consultant. At the University of Pennsylvania, she is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, Affiliated Faculty in the Penn Cultural Heritage Center, and Coordinator of Native American and Indigenous Studies. She also directs a restorative research project, called “The Wampum Trail,” that focuses on the materiality, meaning, and recovery of historical wampum objects. Her 2018 research article—“Broken Chains of Custody: Possessing, Dispossessing, and Repossessing Lost Wampum Belts”—appeared in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, and her book Savage Kin: Indigenous Informants and American Anthropologists (University of Arizona Press, 2018) received the inaugural Council for Museum Anthropology Book Award.

Diana E. Marsh is Assistant Professor of Archives and Digital Curation at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies (iSchool) and current Chair of the Native American Archives Section of the Society of American Archivists. Her current work focuses on increasing discovery and access to colonially held archival collections for Native American and Indigenous communities. From 2015–17, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Curatorial Fellow at the American Philosophical Society where she conducted research and curated exhibitions drawing upon archival collections. Her recent work has appeared in The American Archivist, Archival Science, Archivaria,andArchival Outlook,and her book, Extinct Monsters to Deep Time: Conflict, Compromise, and the Making of Smithsonian’s Fossil Halls was published in 2019 with Berghahn Books.