The International Handbooks of Museum Studies, First Edition. Edited by Sharon Macdonald and Helen Leahy. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The Blackfoot Shirts Project “Our Ancestors Have Come to Visit” Alison K. Brown and Laura Peers Over the past two decades, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill’s (1992) claim that the primary commodity of museums is the production of knowledge has been tempered by an emerging function of social mediation. Some of this mediation occurs within the walls of museums, in traditional exhibition spaces and meeting rooms; other forms involve museum collections but occur outside, in locations as diverse as community centers, prisons, and hospitals (Pye, 2008). Wherever this work occurs, the processes of engaging in social agency and mediation challenge museums and their staff at all levels, from training to policies about working with museum objects to what the museum building, its spaces, and security systems will permit in terms of activities. Museum staff who engage in social agency work also find themselves mediating bet- ween their professional responsibilities, institutional expectations, and the needs and expectations of the groups with whom they work. These tensions can place staff and participants in these projects in frustrating positions: even when both parties want to work in this new way, it can be difficult. We have long championed a collaborative model of museum praxis which recognizes community authority and expertise and serves community goals as much as museum ones (Peers and Brown, 2003; Brown et al., 2006). “Social agency” in museum outreach work with ethnographic collections is an important goal, given the needs for access to heritage objects by indigenous peoples in order to strengthen identity and maintain distinct cultures. However, such work raises a number of par- ticularly difficult issues, involving as it does the logistical challenges of work some- times conducted overseas and in relatively remote communities, and the political challenges of negotiating different agendas and sets of authority. In this chapter we examine some of these issues in relation to the Blackfoot Shirts Project, an international collaboration between the Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM), University of Oxford, England; the Department of Anthropology, University of