Afterlives of Indigenous Archives

UPNE.

INTRODUCTION

The Afterlives of Indigenous Archives

Ivy Schweitzer

We’re not looking at an issue of paper by paper or record group by record group. It’s a whole system of a way of life. Our knowledge systems don’t make sense without spirituality. We are asking for respect for a system of knowledge.

Kim Lawson (Heiltsuk Nation), Protocols for Native American Archival Materials¹

As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, we can acknowledge a good deal of important work on decolonizing the archive of Western knowledge so that it is no longer singular, static, or monolithic. When Michel Foucault reconceived the archive as a discursive formation establishing an order of truth that societies accept as reality, he inextricably linked the archive to politics and power.² Jacques Derrida saw archives as riven by warring forces but he also confirmed that there is no political power without control of the archive, or without memory.³ In the wake of these interventions, scholars, digital humanists, librarians, and activists are rescuing the theory and practice of archives from the Western-dominated archive, born from the rampant nationalisms of Europe with its pretensions to neutrality, objectivity, and comprehension.⁴

Members of identity groups who do not find themselves accurately represented in the archive of the West subject it to a radical critical analysis. Not only have they confronted their own absence or distortion, they have traced the dominant regime’s use of its archives to justify exclusionary policies. In 2012, Dana A. Williams and Marissa K. López celebrated the blossoming of ethnic archives as an opportunity to recast an entrenched paradigm: If the archive has historically provided an opportunity to establish tradition, then the ethnic archive affords an opportunity to do the opposite: to challenge assumptions cultivated as truths; to contest the hegemony of the nation-state’s imagined pasts and futures; and to invoke a multiethnic cacophony of voices that require reconsideration of established knowledge and knowledge production alike (358). Rather than a harmony, ethnic archives produce a sometimes harsh and destabilizing clash of voices and truths. They require us to rethink the archive, not just in terms of who and what we include, but how we produce knowledge. That is, ethnic archives must learn the lesson of transnational and diaspora studies and develop archival methodologies capable of meaningfully engaging distinctions of nonimperial cultures and traditions.⁵ Emerging from these radical critiques is the understanding that archives are always acts of interpretation giving rise to particular practices of reading.⁶ Thus, we must always subject archives, even or especially those we create, to a critical interrogation of the politics of archiving.⁷

These developments have been particularly challenging for those of us working with Indigenous materials. Since the Enlightenment, archives assembled in the West included extensive records of colonialism and imperialism, in which Indigenous peoples around the world appeared as objects of study, collection, curation, and display—rarely as subjects. In the nineteenth century, as Siobhan Senier notes, major collections of Native American, First Nations, Aboriginal, and other Indigenous materials are the products of a global, imperial enterprise to steal cultural materials wholesale from Indigenous communities, in service to the myth that those cultures were dying. Colonial theft and vanishing race stories may not have been invented during the nineteenth century, but this was the period of unprecedented and coordinated archive building in the service of settler colonial supremacy.⁸

Working in the earlier period of first contact, Drew Lopenzina argues that the archival written record left by Europeans is a form of unwitnessing, in which settler-colonialists recognized Native existence and then denigrated or erased it. This unwitnessing is part of the hegemonic architecture Derrida calls the house of the archive, and very often occurs through the writing, transmission, and domination of written texts over other forms of cultural meaning-making. As historian Michel de Certeau notes, writing allowed imperial powers to control Native peoples, even from great distances: The power that writing’s expansionism leaves intact is colonial in principle. It is extended without being changed. It is tautological, immunized against both any alterity that might transform it and whatever dares to resist it.⁹ By unacknowledging Indigenous forms of writing, by destroying or collecting as objects (and thus redefining them as exotic and ahistorical) those they did find, and by imposing Western forms of literacy on Indigenous populations, settler colonists elevated writing, and the archives that preserved it, into the pre-eminent tool of conquest.

Scholars theorize different ways of countering this history. Lopenzina suggests we adopt an interpretive framework he calls "a longhouse of the archive, with roots in Native epistemologies. Alluding to the big house of Algonquian culture, Lopenzina explains that the longhouse is the central location of ceremony and spirituality … a space of vision and memory, narrative and tradition" that can elude Western structures of knowledge and also augment them.¹⁰ Another way of restoring what eludes the Western archive is through the distinction Diana Taylor makes between the archive and the repertoire, which is similar, but not quite equivalent, to the written/oral divide. In her terms, the archive encompasses "supposedly enduring materials (i.e. texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire [consists] of embodied practice/knowledges (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual). The major issue for Taylor is that archival memory succeeds in separating the source of ‘knowledge’ from the knower—in time and space.… Embodied memory, because it is live, exceeds the archive’s ability to capture it."¹¹

To return knowers to their knowledge in past, present, and future archives requires decolonizing our methodologies. This requires understanding Western archives not as neutral repositories, but as means of producing knowledge that is partial, distorting, and often erased the very existence, if not the richness, variety, and vitality of Native cultures. It requires seeing how Western archives and the whole range of their operations—their physical holdings, selective procedures of categorization and classification, interpretive practices and one-sided cultural representations—circumscribe, trivialize, and sometimes completely ignore Indigenous space, cultural practices, and knowledge systems that operate under different understandings of history, progress, time and space, notions of gender, and difference.

In her ground-breaking work Decolonizing Methodologies (1999), Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith draws on the work of British cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall to suggest that archives can be transformed by, and be transformative for, Indigenous people if they are created and utilized with the knowledge, concerns, and perspectives of Indigenous peoples and communities foremost in mind. Kim Lawson, a librarian active in a communal effort to produce protocols for Indigenous Archives, insists that the key to this transformation is recognizing and respecting that Indigenous archives embody many types of Indigenous ways of knowing, as well as embracing patience and collaboration. Given this as a foundation, Native scholars, writers, archivists, and community-based proponents of Indigenous thought and research are working to re-curate existing archives and create new ones to reinforce tribal and community interests and—in the process—redefine American history, literature, and culture.

Calls for decolonizing the archive have also extended to the most recent developments in archival work, the production of digital archives. Although supporters tout cyberspace and digital technology as the new democratic frontier, many scholars and activists argue that tech companies and holding institutions like universities, museums, and libraries develop and use digital technologies in ways that reproduce the colonialist paradigm of Western, white, male, and individualist dominance. A cultural turn that supports innovative archives focused on tribal needs, not the general pursuit of profit or knowledge according to Western academic standards, becomes even harder to sustain as universities become corporatized in times of economic downturn and cultural conservatism. In such a climate, Timothy Powell argues, it will require a new kind of creativity, an expansion of the digital imaginary, to implement archives based on cultures that do not descend from the Euro-American tradition of print culture.¹² Over the past few decades, digital archivists and humanists have stepped up to this challenge, adapting existing digital tools and creating new ones as part of what Kim Christen identifies as the emergence of a global politics of indigeneity, a boom in cultural tourism, and the increased debates over what constitutes—and who owns—intellectual property and cultural knowledge.¹³

Working with insights garnered from her extensive collaboration with the Warumunga people of northern Australia, Christen headed a group that created the Mukurtu content management system, which is based on and can be adapted to the different cultures and needs of Native communities.¹⁴ Not only do Native communities co-curate their materials, because collaboration is structured into this system of archiving, but they can control different levels of access, depending on the ritual sensitivity of documents and communities’ understanding of the public/private opposition not as a binary, but as a spectrum.

Digital projects can preserve and disseminate Indigenous languages, literatures, and cultures in ways that are not based on the Euro-American tradition of print culture. A model of this is Gibagadinamaagoom, a partnership among Medicine Men, Sacred Pipe Carriers, language-keepers, deans and faculty at four tribal and community colleges, filmmakers, and hundreds of Ojibwe students across northern Minnesota as well as the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Minnesota Historical Society, and the American Philosophical Society.¹⁵ Created to address the survivance and pedagogical needs articulated by the Ojibwe community, its design incorporates Ojibwe codes of conduct and belief: users navigate the site according to the seven sacred directions of the Ojibwe cosmos and can access unscripted videos of Ojibwe elders speaking about their culture. Considering how the Ojibwe wisdom-keepers recontextualize digital technology—utilizing it as part of a cultural continuum that can be traced back hundreds, if not thousands, of years, Timothy Powell concludes, from their perspective, digital videos record the oral tradition much more accurately than print media ever did.¹⁶

Another notable example is the Yale Indian Papers Project (YIPP).¹⁷ Curated and annotated by Native and non-Native archivists and scholars working collaboratively, this large database of primary source material from several New England collections and the National Archives of the United Kingdom aspires to be what the editors call a communal dish or ‘common pot,’ a term based on an ancient northeastern Native notion of space that encompasses relations across different communities and their needs within that space.¹⁸ YIPP describes its contemporary version of the common pot as a shared history, a kind of communal liminal space, neither solely Euro-American nor completely Native.¹⁹ Projects such as these give wider audiences unprecedented access to Indigenous archival materials and knowledge about Indigenous lives, past, present, and