News Release
Creighton University
A team led by Creighton University faculty has received a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to digitize a collection of priceless artwork and documents chronicling a landmark 19th century expedition into the American interior.
The grant also allots funding for the development of K-12 curriculum tools that can incorporate the digitized paintings, journals, maps and essays into lesson plans to help further educate students on Native American culture and heritage.
Two Creighton College of Arts and Sciences faculty members — Simon Appleford, PhD, and Adam Sundberg, PhD, both associate professors of history and digital humanities — will spearhead the project. A third College of Arts and Sciences professor, Ann Mausbach, will lead the development of the curriculum. Creighton students will assist throughout the process.
“This project will expose students in a really explicit way to some of the methods that we have in the digital humanities,” Sundberg says. “It’s not just professional scholarship they’ll be doing. They’re going to be learning these practical skills and employing them on a potentially very impactful project.”
Creighton is partnering with members of the Omaha Tribe and Nebraska Indian Community College to ensure the project properly conveys cultural themes represented in the artwork.
The original collection represents the most complete archive of material from the expedition of German nobleman Maximilian von Wied and Swiss painter Karl Bodmer across North America between 1832 and 1834. In their travels, the pair encountered more than 20 Indigenous Nations.
Their work, titled “The Natural Face of North America: A Public Portal to the Maximilian-Bodmer Collection,” has been compiled as the result of a collaboration between Creighton, Omaha’s Joslyn Art Museum and the Nebraska Indian Community College. The Joslyn’s collection includes more than 1,000 objects from the expedition, including von Wied’s handwritten, three-volume journal and more than 400 original watercolors and drawings by Bodmer.
“A major component of this project is working with these communities that Maximilian and Bodmer encountered — the Omaha Tribe in northern Nebraska, the Mandan people and others,” Appleford says. “We want to work with them to make sure that what we’re doing — how we’re framing the project, how we’re talking about the project and contextualizing the expedition — reflects their perspectives.”
About Creighton University
Creighton University, founded in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1878, is one of 27 Jesuit colleges and universities in the U.S. The Omaha campus has more than 8,000 undergraduate, graduate, and professional students among nine schools and colleges. No other university its size offers students such a comprehensive academic environment with personal attention from faculty-mentors. The new health sciences campus in Phoenix, which will accommodate more than 900 students, is the largest expansion outside of Omaha in Creighton’s history
