Making memory sovereign/making sovereign memory

Abstract

This article foregrounds the activist memory projects of four Indigenous women artists, recorded as part of a digital storytelling project in 2018. These memory projects collectively represent a refusal of settler colonial frameworks and a grounding in Indigenous knowledges, which challenge institutional understandings of the archive and dominant conceptions of memory. Through close reading and analysis, we argue that these storytellers’ practices – rooted in Land, body, ancestral relations, and creativity – are not efforts to simply right the colonial archive, nor are they insertions into colonial narratives; instead, they remember differently, with distinct modes and mechanisms for accessing, producing and circulating memory. Their work, in concert with Indigenous scholars cited throughout this article, extends not only the epistemological basis of the archive. It also expands the ontology of memory: pushing memory scholars to expand their understandings of what is possible to remember, and how memory is accessed and shared.