Redressing Archival Harm: Ownership, Access, and Indigenous Knowledge

Abstract

ABSTRACT Institutions that house Indigenous oral histories are often ignorant to the harm they perpetuate by treating these materials without rooting curatorial considerations in Indigenous approaches to knowledge. Issues of categorization, attribution, and access, among many others, often go unaddressed, causing serious harm to Indigenous peoples and their cultural resources. It is imperative that Western archives, libraries, and museums seek out alternatives to systems that perpetuate settler-colonialism, and work to place control of oral histories back in Indigenous hands. In this paper we present several considerations for working with Indigenous oral histories in Western archives, provide case studies that promote the ethical curation and sharing of Indigenous materials, and close with an overview of our current work to revitalize and redress a large collection of Native American oral histories presently housed at the University of Florida.