Email: jami.powell@unc.edu
Phone: None
Areas of Interest:
Museum anthropology; decolonizing methodologies; ethnology and ethnohistory; collaborative museology; materiality; NAGPRA; American Indians; Oklahoma
Education:
2011- Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, ABD 17 November 2014
2014 MA, Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill
2009 BA, Anthropology and Spanish, magna cum laude, University of Denver
Research:
As a citizen of the Osage Nation and an anthropologist, my research focuses on the study of American Indian expressive forms through an engagement with decolonization. Although my training is in anthropology, I approach my research through an interdisciplinary lens informed by American Indian Studies, history, museum studies, and art history. My dissertation—“Creating an Osage Future: Art, Resistance, and Self-Representation”—will examine how Osage citizens negotiate, manipulate, and subvert static notions of indigeneity through the creation of art in ways that acknowledge and engage the complexity and multiplicity that characterizes indigenous experiences. This project will not only allow me to understand some of the tactics indigenous artists are using to imagine a stronger future for indigenous peoples, but also to interrogate how digital technologies can be used to build more equitable and mutually beneficial relationships between communities and academic institutions.
Selected Publications:
2014 Osage Ribbon Work and the Expression of Osage Nationalism: Re-Imagining Approaches to Material Culture and Nationhood. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Master’s Thesis.
2012 Repatriation and Constructs of Identity (with C. Colwell-Chanthaphonh). Journal of Anthropological Research 68(2):191-222.
2011 The Repatriation of Culturally Unidentifiable Human Remains (with C. Colwell-Chanthaphonh and R. Maxson). Museum Management and Curatorship 26(1): 27-43.
2010 Insiders and Outsiders: Contending Portraits of American Indians (with C. Colwell-Chanthaphonh). Museum Magazine February/March:6-7.