Patricia Pierce Erikson
Patricia Erikson returned to her home state of Maine after serving as a curator at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma, Washington. There she worked with the Nisqually Tribe to create online educational materials that met state laws mandating education about Native American cultures. Previously, she worked collaboratively with the Makah Cultural Research Center on the Makah Indian Reservation to publish the book Voices of a Thousand People (University of Nebraska Press, 2002) and articles such as "Forging Indigenous Methodologies on Cape Flattery: The Makah museum as a center of collaborative research" in American Indian Quarterly. Her work with the Makah museum and the Zapotec museo comunitario of Santa Ana del Valle, Oaxaca led her to research indigenous social movements at the Smithsonian Institution. Her scholarship has been published in several journals, such as Cultural Anthropology, Ethnohistory, American Anthropologist, Museum Anthropology, and American Indian Culture and Research Journal. Erikson has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, the Inter-American Foundation, and the Maine Women Writers Collection. She is currently applying a feminist geography approach to the history of American Arctic exploration, specifically to the power relationships involving material culture on the Peary expeditions. When she is not teaching or consulting with museums, she is working on Wabanaki Studies curriculum development that supports implementation of LD291 in Maine.
