Northern CommunitiesTransitioning to Resilience

This research/project is supported by SSHRCC but probably not a CURA initiative. From the web site at https://grasac.org/gks/gks_about.php

The organization is an international collaborative research partnership of Aboriginal community researchers, museum and archival scholars and university researchers. Members contribute insights and knowledge from their own areas of understanding and in turn benefit from the insights and knowledge of others. GRASAC consists of two key components: the network of people who meet, work together on research projects, and exchange ideas; and the web-based software tools being developed to enable remote collaboration and sharing.

We believe that our research is urgently needed because the complex problems that trouble contemporary relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples cannot be solved without a thorough understanding of their deep historic contexts. There are many forces that have combined to silence and disrupt Aboriginal perspectives on the history of the Great Lakes region across the four centuries since the beginning of a sustained European presence in North America. Residential schooling and government programs of assimilation contributed to the language loss which eroded the oral transmission of traditional histories. Further fragmentation resulted from the institutional practices of archives and museums, which have by traditional practice divided and scattered heritage materials among different repositories.

GRASAC aims to address these problems through an innovative collaborative research model that brings these scattered items of historical heritage together. We use both Aboriginal and Western approaches to recover and incorporate distinctive Aboriginal traditions of thought and knowledge into our understandings. Our strategy is also to facilitate digital repatriation of heritage materials where physical repatriation is not currently possible or practical.