When art historian Ruth Phillips walked through the Aboriginal collections at the British Museum in London more than two years ago, she was in for a surprise.

In front of her team were quill-embroidered birch bark bowls, and at the bottom of the bowls were the names of the makers.

"We have almost no items from the 19th century with names of makers," says Phillips, an art history professor at Carleton University and the Canada research chair in modern culture, referring to historical objects and art made by indigenous peoples in the Great Lakes region.

Phillips' colleague Alan Corbiere determined that the makers came from Manitoulin Island, shedding light on the mystery of where the artifacts had originated.

This information was then put into a digital database that Phillips has created to offer a view into the history of indigenous groups in the region.

It was this database and Phillips' other work in relation to Aboriginal art and history that earned her this year's Discovery Award in Arts and Humanities, one of the Premier's Innovation Awards.

Phillips was presented with the award, which consists of a $250,000 grant, last week in Toronto.

"It's a celebration of Ontario's most accomplished researchers," said John Milloy, the province's minister of research and innovation. "(Phillips) is an internationally renowned art historian and curator. She has expertise on and has had a huge influence on museums and the preservation of our culture," said Milloy.

"When it comes to Ontario and Canada's cultural heritage, I think it's important that we understand the role that Aboriginal Peoples played."

Phillips says the award indicates how far Canadians have come in recognizing various traditions and cultures.

In 2005, she founded the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures. The idea was to create a digital database that would bring together museum collections, archived material, pictures, videos and information on the culture of Aboriginal peoples from the Great Lakes region.

Organizing the information is important because, in Canada's early days, Europeans took home native artifacts. A hundred years ago, museums began to grow, and liked to acquire many objects that had the same look. This led them to trade some relics for others, with the result that the original artifacts became scattered. "It's very hard to make sense of them when there are only parts of them there," Phillips says.

Members of the alliance have been making trips to museums in Europe and elsewhere, taking digital photographs of their displays of Aboriginal artifacts and entering them into the database.

"The database is a way of returning information to originating communities and a way for people to learn more about the (museum) collections," Phillips says.

Often, the knowledge that museums and other institutions have about these collections is obsolete, she says. "Often museums are left with material from long ago with attitudes toward culture and race that are outdated."

The database would help fix this since it involves the creation of new records, she says. As well, Aboriginals usually go on the museum trips to see and respond to how they have been identified in the past.

Other times, Aboriginals are invited to identify whether there is another use or meaning for items already in the database.

"There can be multiple understandings of an object. There can be a number of ways in which something is used," Phillips says. "What will be interesting is to have different perspectives."

Another powerful element of the database is that it allows dialogues to take place between Aboriginal peoples and non-Aboriginals, says Heidi Bohaker, assistant professor of Aboriginal history at the University of Toronto and one of the founding members of the alliance.

Corbiere, executive director of the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation and a collaborator on the database, says it's significant that members of indigenous groups are working on the project. Corbiere is from the Anishinaabe nation and says the database has helped to restore its traditions.

"Our heritage has been taken away by museum collectors a lot of the time; we weren't allowed to practise our traditions. This (database) is actually opening that up again to rediscovery."

Individuals wanting to access the database need to register and use a password. However, the group hopes to create a separate database for the general public within the next couple of years.

Kim Matheson, vice-president of research and international at Carleton, says the database has provided a novel way of presenting culture.

"Lots of times, as non-Aboriginals, we like Aboriginal culture and have an appreciation (of it), but Phillips goes beyond the appreciation and shows how important it is for them to have a voice."

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