Capturing a Vanished Time Of federal ethnic cleansing.
Young Americans for Freedom - FL
posted August 26, 2004
Capturing a vanished time
By Jim Regan | csmonitor.com
In the 1830s, native Americans from the eastern half of the United
States were being "relocated" to the West, while those already in the
West were having their last experience with living in a land that was
actually under their own control. At the same time, George Catlin, an
ex-lawyer from Philadelphia decided to "gain fame" by recording Indian
lives and cultures before they were permanently altered by European
influences. Campfire Stories with George Catlin offers both historical
and contemporary perspectives on the meetings and conflicts between
native and European worlds.
Online for about two years, this multi-award winning site (significant
awards) from the Smithsonian's American Art Museum uses a Flash
interface to showcase its collection of Catlin's paintings. Catlin
spent six years following the trails of Lewis and Clark, while
painting native Americans, their lives and their landscapes as they
existed in the 1830s. His work eventually grew to more than 500
portraits and landscapes. Campfire Stories, though it does not include
all the artist's works, does number in the hundreds.
The paintings are presented with historical documents as well as
commentary from modern experts on art, culture and anthropology. To
avoid a purely academic presentation of the materials, the site
delivers its content through the device of narratives told around a
virtual campfire.
The choice of a campfire motif is interesting, though the interface
for the site's four themes feels inharmonious. While the art itself is
obviously more than a century old, and the chosen fiction of the
presentation is a presumably low-tech pile of burning logs,
participants are presented with an interactive circle that seems like
something between a lazy susan and Star Trek transporter pad. That
said, the content being presented is interesting, varied, and
sufficiently comprehensive for most visitors' interest levels, and the
generous use of bandwidth-friendly multi-media keeps things rolling
along nicely.
In the first of the four themes, Ancestral Lands, narrators include
website host Peter Matthiessen, a virtual Catlin, an anthropologist
addressing the subject of Sacred Geography, an art historian
discussing Catlin's work, and the first woman to hold the position of
native American chief on the subject of land claims. Commentaries are
accompanied by embedded QuickTime slide shows (which scan over
Catlin's paintings as the audio plays), as well as background
information about the speaker, printable transcripts of each segment,
and occasionally, such extras as panoramic QTVRs of archaeological
sites. Slideshows can be paused at any time, and a 'Back to Campfire'
link returns the surfer to the other speakers.
In addition to the illustrated narratives, each topic also includes a
scrollable gallery of paintings relevant to the theme (each with its
own background information, comments from Catlin's notes, and links to
fullscreen images). Each section also has a large collection of
audio-only files with additional observations by the site's living and
dead contributors, images and transcripts from one of Catlin's
sketchbooks, and a densely populated interactive timeline - which is
itself largely illustrated by more of Catlin's works. An interactive
Map displays such details as Catlin's routes through the Plains, and
the dispersal of the native Americans during various points in
history.
A For Teachers section (yes, it's getting to be that time again)
offers some theme-specific lesson plans, and transcripts for the
audio-only files are available through the Interviews page.
The use of slideshows rather than full motion video keeps the download
times well within reasonable limits, and the quality of the images is
crisp and clean. A Keyword Search seemed to be inoperative during my
visits (perhaps a victim of the site's 'advanced' years), though I
felt no pressing need for the feature during my time at this
particular site.
In terms of design, websites can age very quickly - especially if they
are in the vicinity of the cutting edge when they were created. When
you first encounter Campfire's splash page and its signature
navigation, you're certainly aware that this production wasn't
launched in the last few weeks, but the further in you delve, the less
obvious the age becomes, and it never detracts from the entertainment
and educational value of the site's contents. As for the "stories"
component - with the exception of Catlin's own notes, "Campfire
Analysis" might have been a title closer to the mark. But you would
have been less likely to drop by to listen to Campfire Analyses - and
that omission would have left you a little poorer.
Campfire Stories with George Catlin can be found at
http://catlinclassroom.si.edu/index.html.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0826/p25s01-stin.html