A Framing Introduction 1

This session continues what I hope will become a regular feature of the American Philosophical Society (APS) meetings-an update on the American Indian commitment mandated by the Society's founders under the rubric of useful and reaffirmed by annual meeting in 2013 and 2014. We have made substantial strides in the 18 months since new member Robert J. Miller, an enrolled member of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe, and I spoke about Society initiatives evolving in response to the aspirations of Native communities for cultural and linguistic revitalization.In spring 2014, the members who attended the APS council and business meetings officially established the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR) under the auspices of the Library and the directorship of Timothy B. Powell. The Franz Boas Papers: Documentary Edition, of which I serve as general editor, proceeds apace. The initial volume of framing essays by editorial contributors, Franz Boas as Public Intellectual: Theory, Ethnography, Activism, appeared in August 2015 published by the University of Nebraska Press. The APS completed digitization of the Boas professional papers in November 2014. Both CNAIR and the Boas project have initiated collaborative relationships with the Kwakwaka'wakw (whom Boas called the Kwakiutl) of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, as well as with other indigenous communities among whom Boas did his seminal research.Anthony F. C. Wallace was unable to attend the meeting due to health concerns. His paper will be read by Martin (Marty) Levitt, retiring Librarian and the moving force behind recent Native American initiatives.2 Marty's commitment and gravitas have brought us to this point.Martin Levitt earned his doctorate in history in 1990 from Temple University under the direction of APS member Russell F. Weigley, and he has taught in that department since 1992, attaining the rank of professor in 2000. Marty joined the APS library staff as an information professional in 1986, already well versed in the historic significance of documents held by the Society, especially the Boas papers and related Native American collections. He was elected to the APS in 2013.He held a Fulbright Fellowship in archives, is a Fellow of the Mary and David Eccles Centre of the British Library, and served as president of the Academy of Certified Archivists. He was a key founder and the first director of the Philadelphia-area Center for the History of Science, a consortium of regional research institutions now housed at the APS and sponsor of 13 fellows this year.3 Marty has spearheaded systematic APS collections on the history of science.In 2003, Martin Levitt succeeded Edward C. Carter III as Librarian of the APS. Renovation and reorganization under his leadership have emphasized technology, especially digitization, conservation, and cataloguing of resources. He developed public services, including the Friends of the Library lecture program. He expanded the multiple publics served by the APS to include indigenous communities whose intellectual property resides under the stewardship of the Society's Library. Priorities include the handling of culturally sensitive materials, digital knowledge sharing with originary communities, and the building of research capacity within those communities. CNAIR, under the leadership of the second speaker in this session (Timothy B. Powell), will implement these initiatives and solidify the leadership of the APS Library in national and international archival innovation. It is therefore more than fitting that Marty joined the speakers for this session.Anthony F. C. (Tony) Wallace, elected to the APS in 1969, received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1950 under the direction of A. Irving Pete Hallowell, whose papers are held in the Library and are crucial to current initiatives among the Ojibwe, drawing particularly on the transcripts and photographs donated to the APS by Maureen Matthews in the course of her revisiting Hallowell's fieldwork sites. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.