Research Plan Post: YES!

My group consists of Joe, Cory and Adam and our general topic is Athabask(c?)an Potlach's. I got delegated with the subheading of the history of potlach's as well as the different reasons for throwing them such as a death, a birth ext. This subheading topic will be my responsibility and one of the other members is going to overlook the information and we are all going to get together one day and put it all online because I am technology inept. One of the questions our class came up with, that applied to my subheading, was "are they still used now?" and while I do know the answer to this question, a very interesting way I can approach it is comparing and contrasting the traditional reasons for throwing potlach's with the modern reasons. Some questions I myself am interested in is what brought along these big gatherings? Is it comparable at all too something like our thanksgiving? Just musings, but the research will help guide my thought process a bit.
My question is important because as Lance said, these cultures are starting to disappear and my way of thinking is that no matter what the ancient culture, it can show us a little piece of the history of the world. I am actually very interested in history, so this is actually fun. :) I envision my audience to be people who, like most American's, is absolutely fascinated with Alaska (why I do not know) but actually know nothing about it. This topic would be important to them because it might actually shed a little bit of truthful light on Alaska instead of the mass media appearance of Alaska being an in-case-of-the-zombie-apocalypse vacation spot.
To find sources I'm going to start with the library on campus because as a UAF student I am so close to raw information, so I think it would be best to start there. As far as online sources I am going to try to go through universities or like PBS type places. Basically, legit sources. :)
As far as a timeline... Honestly I never quite schedule out my projects but I think this weekend is going to be a BIG homework weekend, so I will get a big hunk of the raw research done, because that I can do in just a couple sittings. But I will slowly, day by day, start piecing together the raw research and make it sound coherent and intelligent (hopefully). Also I would like to take it to the writing center because my biggest challenge is avoiding wordiness (obviously) and sentence length variation. So it's going to be a big work weekend then the putting it all together eloquently will be a day by day process.
With the Wiki page we decided ultimately to create a new page. The existing potlach page was very very general with almost NO distinctions between groups and the Athabaskan wiki page was pretty much bare. There was only an "Athabaskan Language" page. And if anyone can answer this which is the correct spelling? Athabaskan or Athabascan, because online it has it both ways, but the book Joe got from the library spelled it Athabaskan. :/ SO CONFUSED!