The Changing Lives of Women’s Knives: Ulus, Travel, and Transformation

As the biographies of objects reflect the practices, values, and connections of the people who own and exchange them, the circulation of material culture across and between societies can demonstrate how people navigate cultural contact. In the 19th-century North American Arctic, ulus were not only utilitarian tools that entered transcontinental trading networks, they were signs from which indigenous people in whaling villages and nonnative...