Mr Michael Galban
Centre for Research Collections Fellowship, May - June 2022
Home institution: Seneca Art & Culture Center, Ganondagan State Historic Site
Michael Galban is the Curator at the Seneca Art & Culture Center at Ganondagan State Historic Site. An expert of Native American material culture and art, he is a member of the board of directors of the Museum Association of New York (MANY) and worked as a consultant for various film and television projects. Michael is the author of a monograph on the historical art of Robert Griffing and has published broadly on Haudenosaunee material culture. Currently, he is completing a book on Moose-hair embroidered tumplines of the Northeast Woodlands and collaborating with the Museé du Quai Branly on the upcoming exhibition “Wampum.”
Project Title: Deciphering the Indigenous Artifact Language of the Edinburgh Indian Primer (1669) with Dr Steffi Dippold
Front and centre of Michael Galban and Steffi Dippold’s collaborative project is The Indian Primer, a small abecedary in Wampanoag, one of the many Indigenous languages once spoken in colonial America. Printed in 1669, The Indian Primer is part of a larger group of missionary materials inked on the earliest press in North America, the so-called Cambridge Press at Harvard College. Housed today in special collections at the University of Edinburgh, the Primer is an imminently important material artifact: it is the only surviving copy of the Wampanoag reading manual and the only known example of seventeenth-century Indigenous book arts. Sporting pale white buckskin covers artfully emblazoned with foliated designs and large strawberry ornaments, the extraordinary binding makes the volume into a unique survivor and material archive of otherwise unrecorded Indigenous practices, participation, and expertise of early American bookmaking and culture.