On September 9-10, 2016, archivists and educators gathered at Dartmouth College to celebrate the launch of The Occom Circle, an online collection of manuscripts, books, and images that map out the social world of America’s first published Native author, Samson Occom. Our host, Professor Ivy Schweitzer, has served as the site’s Project Director since its inception. Drawing together Stephanie Fielding, Linguist of the Mohegan Tribe, Peter Carini, College Archivist, Rauner Special Collections, Dartmouth,
Christina Dulude, Web Architect/Engineer, Dartmouth College, and scores of others, Professor Schweitzer created a stimulating workspace for ideas about the repercussions of digital collecting for Native archives.
Over the course of those two days, we heard from many different practitioners of what administrators at education institutions like to call the “digital humanities.” Yet most of the speakers offered cautionary warnings about leaping into digital collections of indigenous materials without first considering the implications for community access, intellectual property rights, and the like.
On the first day of the gathering, Stephanie Fitzgerald, director of Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Kansas spoke eloquently about the dangers of archiving indigenous materials in general, and digital archiving in particular. She spoke of archives as “sites of concentrated knowledge,” whose access is often limited for indigenous community members. Such archiving of Native materials also may involve the improper circulation of privileged knowledge, stories, songs, ceremonials, and material objects that should never be told, sung, or used by outsiders to the traditions that originated them. The provenance of such materials is also problematic, and Professor Fitzgerald cautioned her audience to consider whether the items in any given archive had been “given or simply taken?”
Attendees at the Dartmouth Conference.
In many Native communities, information is gendered and distributed across a wide range of social groups—clans, medicine societies, families. The Euro-American conceptualization of archives, however, assumes that the centralization of information is best, and an archive is thus the archetypal site of knowledge concentration.
In asking what makes an archive indigenous, Fitzgerald hit upon something more important than its contents. Any archive of Native material would, by its very nature, embody kinship ties, and social relationships unique to the community from which it was collected. In her words, an indigenous archive is one that contains “the undervalued labor of many, many souls.”
Stephanie Fitzgerald’s recent book, “Native Women and Land” (University of New Mexico Press, 2015).
For Fitzgerald and several other speakers, the key to creating and maintaining an indigenous archive lies in finding ways to replicate the embodied nature of indigenous epistemologies and material practices in the architecture of the archive itself. It also involves reorienting the mission of archives from the concentration of knowledge to the curation of the pathways of knowing that the items in the archive trace out. Finally, it may also entail creating mechanisms for the restriction of knowledge circulation, something quite antithetical to the received practice of archiving for much of the past two centuries.
Jennifer O’Neal, who works at the University of Oregon and is a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde of Oregon, offered a brief history of how Native archivists have gathered over the years to establish clear “shared stewardship protocols” to guide the handing of indigenous materials by non-Native collections. Beginning with the 1984 National Endowment for the Humanities Native American Archives Project, spurred in part by renewed efforts by tribes to achieve federal recognition, the trend over the years has been to move beyond mere custodial concerns and into questions of social justice. O’Neal participated in a conference dedicated to these issues at Northern Arizona University in 2006. There, Native archivist agreed to “stop simply wrestling with ideas” and to make real structural changes in archives around the country. Their manifesto looked like this:
(see http://www2.nau.edu/libnap-p/)
Protocols was deeply influenced by “numerous professional ethical codes as well as international declarations recognizing Indigenous rights and the ground-breaking Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Protocols for Libraries, Archives, and Information Services.”
At Dartmouth, the conferees revisited this subject with a goal shared by the archivists in Arizona: “to foster increased cooperation between tribal and non-tribal libraries and archives . . . “
In my next posting, I’ll describe a few of the presentations by other speakers, and by institutions like Dartmouth, who have begun to launch digital indigenous archives with similar protocols in mind.
Further Reading
http://www2.nau.edu/libnap-p/resources.html
Participants included:
Donna Moody, (Abenaki) Department of Anthropology, U of Massachusetts, Amherst; John Moody, The Winter Center for Indigenous Traditions, Hanover, NH; Josh Bartlett, (PhD candidate, English, SUNY Albany); Stephanie Fitzgerald (Associate Professor English and Indigenous Studies, University of Kansas); Alyssa Reichardt (PhD candidate, History, Yale University); Marie Balsley Taylor (PhD candidate, English, Purdue University); Hilary Wyss, (Hargis Professor of American Literature, Auburn University); Morgan Swan (Special Collections Education and Outreach Librarian, Dartmouth); Jennifer O’ Neal (Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, University Historian and Archivist, Instructor, Native Studies Program, University of Oregon); Gordon Henry (White Earth Chippewa, Professor of English, Michigan State University); Angela Calcaterra (Assistant Professor of English, University of North Texas); Melanie Taylor (Associate Professor and Chair of Native American Studies, Dartmouth); Alyssa Mt. Pleasant (Assistant Professor, Transnational Studies, SUNY Buffalo); Ellen Cushman (Cherokee, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Diversity and Inclusion, Northeastern University); Damián Baca (Assistant Professor of English and Modern Languages, University of Arizona); Jason Lewis (Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec); Jay Satterfield, (Rauner Special Collections Librarian, Dartmouth College); Kelly Wisecup (Assistant Professor, English, Northwestern); Patricia Marroquin Norby (Director of the McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, Chicago, IL); Christine de Lucia (Assistant Professor, History, Mt Holyoke); Ridie Ghezzi (Head, Research and Instruction Services, Baker-Berry Library, Dartmouth); Thomas Peace (Huron University College); Alan Corbiere (M’Chigeeng First Nation); Susan Glover (Laurentian University); Bruce Duthu (The Frank J. Guarini Associate Dean of the Faculty for International Studies & Interdisciplinary Programs, and Samson Occom Professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth); Rick Hill (Director of the Deyohaha:ge: Indigenous Knowledge Center at Six Nations Polytechnic in Ontario, CA); Tim Powell (Director of Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR) at the American Philosophical Society; University of Pennsylvania).
