Minority reports: indigenous and community voices in archives. Papers from the 4th International Conference on the History of Records and Archives (ICHORA4), Perth, Western Australia, August 2008 (original) (raw)

Truth, Reconciliation, and Indigenous Archival Memory (2016)

Archivaria, 2016

Cet article place la science archivistique en dialogue avec les études autochtones et les théories raciales critiques afin d'explorer deux cas de cour liés aux documents d'archives et à la Commission de vérité et réconciliation au Canada. Il examine sur quelle base la cour pouvait conclure que certains documents devaient être produits, d'autres conservés de façon temporaire, et d'autres encore, détruits. En tenant compte des études récentes qui préconisent un changement de la rhétorique au sujet des droits humains et de la diversité dans le discours archivistique, je soutiens que la disparition discursive ou la « spectralisation » des peuples autochtones joue un rôle crucial dans le processus de dépossession de leurs terres, de leurs ressources et de leur héritage culturel. En prenant note des tensions qui existent entre le désir d'être inscrit dans la mémoire et l'envie d'être oublié, j'affirme que l'incorporation de documents créés par des peuples autochtones ou à leur sujet dans les archives nationales du colonisateur demeure cruciale à la constitution de la mémoire historique archivistique de ce dernier (au détriment d'une mémoire historique archivistique autochtone), qui transforme la honte et la culpabilité nationales canadiennes en gloire et honneur nationaux. En conceptualisant le centre d'archives national canadien comme un lieu hanté par la crainte et le désir, et par la culpabilité et le triomphe nationaux, je montre comment les cas de cour de la Commission de vérité et réconciliation révèlent ou mettent en évidence les histoires de violence coloniale. ABSTRACT This article places archival science, Indigenous studies, and critical theories on race and colonialism in dialogue so as to explore two court cases related to records and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada. It questions on what basis the courts would rule that some records were to be produced, others temporarily preserved, and yet others destroyed. Considering recent scholarship calling for a shift from a human rights and diversity rhetoric in the archival conversation, I argue that the discursive disappearance or spectralization of Indigenous people plays a crucial role in dispossessing them of their lands, resources, and cultural heritage. Noting the tensions between a desire to be remembered and a longing for oblivion, I argue that the incorporation of records by or about Indigenous people into the national settler archival repository is crucial for the constitution of a settler historical archival memory (at the expense of an Indigenous one) that transforms Canadian national shame and guilt into national glory and honour. Conceptualizing the Canadian national archive as a haunted site of fear and desire, national guilt and national triumph, I

Indigenous archiving and wellbeing: surviving, thriving, reconciling

Community Archives, Community Spaces: Heritage, Memory and Identity, 2020

Too often, Australia’s mainstream discourse continues to be written and crafted to endorse and valorise the actions of an often-violent past, whilst disregarding the effects of the brutal systems of colonisation upon Indigenous Australian peoples. The authors acknowledge the diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and communities across Australia and use the term ‘Indigenous Australian’in this chapter to refer to the First Peoples of Australia. Various forms of trauma continue to impact upon many Indigenous Australian people, families and communities, contributing to ongoing discrimination and disadvantage (Atkinson, 2002). Cultural trauma is where a collective group is affected by a horrendous event that irrevocably marks memory and changes identity forever (Alexander, 2004). It is impossible to be an Indigenous Australian today and not be connected in some way to individual and collective experiences of invasion and colonisation. As is so often the case, recordkeeping and archiving play a crucial role in the progression of colonial and oppressive regimes. Australia’s government and collecting archival institutions manage this legacy, evidencing colonisation, not just in their archival holdings, but also in how these holdings are appraised, described, managed and made accessible. As Indigenous Australians in the second half of the 20th century have sought access to records in institutional archives that document their lives, they have re-confronted not just the trauma in the records, but in the edifices and apparatuses around them. Moreover, when Indigenous peoples interact with archival materials that tell stories through a …

Afterlives of Indigenous Archives

2019

Statement of Theme/Figuration/ the Curatorium American Indian people and cultures have circled and circulated, and continue to circle and circulate, through, in and around acts of curates, curators, curation, and the lesser and greater installations of American curatoriums by engaging, disengaging, avoiding, resisting, and redressing the people, places, proj ects, contexts, jurisdictions, and critical interventions involved in the development of the Great American Indian curatorium, whether curated by Natives or nonNatives, or by some combination of both. Curatoriums rely on legal, social, cultural, and po liti cal orga nizational pro cesses of se lection, collection, ordering, exclusion, removal, relocation, production, and interpretation, along with structured event development, to recontextualize Native culture, peoples, places, and repre sen tations, as filtered through human/technical adaptations. (Let me say that current engagements with and extensions of the digital human arc...

Introduction: From Containing to Shaping to Performing Ethnicity in Archives

Identity Palimpsests: Archiving Ethnicity in the U.S. and Canada (Sacramento, CA: Litwin Press), 2014

The interest in and literature on community archives 1 in recent years has expanded and accelerated 2 in parallel with the changing nature of the notion of community across disciplines: from locus of identity formation, it has become a vector where identity is negotiated, performed, dissected and fragmented. This process disrupts traditional patterns of understanding ethnicity as a static framework, and instead reconceptualizes it as a sense making process. The use of the verb "archiving" in the title of this volume reflects this transition from discussing ethnicity in the context of "archives as place" or "archives as practice" to approaching it as a verb-based framework (a "verbing") that, according to Brenda Dervin, emphasizes the sense-making potential amidst the complexity and diversity of available information. 4 "Archiving" also reflects the active, interpretative role of archives as constituent parts of what Paul Ricoeur has called the "historiographical operation," i.e., the process of researching and writing history that supports, but also sometimes refutes collective memory. 5 For Jeannette Bastian and Ben Alexander, this interpretative role of archives is manifest in the process of formation, collection, maintenance, diffusion and use of records and their importance in "constructing a community, consolidating its identity and shaping its memories." The book aims to supplement and further the ongoing dialogue on communities and community research. In order to do this, it emphasizes three main points:

Editors’ introduction to Keeping cultures alive: Archives and Indigenous human rights

Archival Science, 2012

Keeping Cultures Alive investigates the relationship between Indigenous human rights and the archives through an interdisciplinary and comparative lens, bringing together papers by Indigenous and non-Indigenous experts in Indigenous studies, human rights, law and archival science. It explores Indigenous human rights in an international context with particular reference to the implications of the international human rights agenda for current and future archival practice in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.

Communities of Memory": Pluralising Archival Research and Education Agendas

2005

Global archival frameworks of the kind imagined in the pluralising 4 th dimension of the records continuum model face a major challenge: how to build archival systems and associated practices that operate and inter-operate effectively worldwide, but respect and empower the local and indigenous. In this paper we explore the nature of that challenge and the implications for archival research and education agendas, and for archival science itself in an increasingly globalised world. Disclaimer: The authors are keenly aware that this article grapples with complex insider-outsider issues and is inevitably framed in terms of a particular world view. This may well be challenged by or will evolve based on the richer understandings of differing worldviews that it is hoped will flow from engaging with the local and the indigenous, and pluralising our research and education agendas on the basis of those understandings. We would also hope to see this engagement reflected in the pages of this an...

Indigenous records - connecting, critiquing and diversifying collections

Archives and Manuscripts, 2014

The management of Indigenous records and collections presents challenges to traditional archival methods and practice. Indigenous issues relating to the management of archives are important questions that should be discussed and considered broadly by the profession. In this paper, I will draw on my own professional and personal experiences of working as an Indigenous archivist to illustrate some of these challenges.

Reclaiming archives: guest editorial

Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture

Highlighting perspectives from First Nations peoples whose cultural heritage is held in archives of various types, this article sets the scene for this special edition on “Reclaiming Archives.” Emerging protocols for Indigenous community engagement with archiving institutions have been driven by community demands for access, digitisation and return of archival cultural heritage records, and supported by various peak professional organisations such as the International Council on Archives, the International Council of Museums and the Indigenous Archives Collective. A complex history of exploitation, resistance and trauma surrounds First Nations cultural records created during Australia“s “Assimilation Era“ (roughly 1935-1975), and several contributions to the volume explore the implications of this colonial past for management and reclamation of such archival records today. Indeed, the authors contend that institutions today have much to learn from engagement with community members s...

Community and Cultural Chronicles: Archives Reflected for the People by the People

2016

This paper looks to community archives and the ways in which they represent the history of often-underrepresented communities, and therefore how they enhance a nation’s history. Three Canadian community archive projects are examined, including the following initiatives: the [murmur] project in Toronto, the Project Naming collection, and the John Freeman Walls Historic Site and Underground Railroad Museum in Puce, Ontario. These three community-archive projects are highlighted to demonstrate how they provide a more holistic picture of various aspects of Canadian history and culture, and also how they fit within the community-archive framework of various theorists, such as Jeannette Bastian, Terry Cook, Andrew Flinn, Anne Gilleland and Karen Underhill.