Indigenous Archives Research Articles

Review: We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California, by Martin Rizzo-Martinez

Book Review| May 01 2023 Review: We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California, by Martin Rizzo-Martinez Martin Rizzo-Martinez. We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 536 pp. Illustrations. Hardcover $80.00. Natale Zappia Natale Zappia NATALE ZAPPIA is associate professor of history and director of the Institute for Sustainability at California State University, Northridge. His works include The Many Faces of Edward Sherriff Curtis: A Collection of Portraits and Stories from Native North America (with Steadman Upham, 2006); Traders and Raiders: The Indigenous World of the Colorado Basin (2014); and Rez Metal (film and book, 2020). Zappia is also the associate project director of the Early California Cultural Atlas. He currently works with local tribal communities in Southern California on the Los Angeles Landscape History Mapping Project. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2023) 100 (2): 126–128. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.2.126 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Natale Zappia; Review: We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California, by Martin Rizzo-Martinez. California History 1 May 2023; 100 (2): 126–128. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.2.126 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search We Are Not Animals is a monumental volume exploring the Indigenous contours that shaped the colonial, Mexican, and American periods of Alta California. Hyperfocused on the intricate and continuous lineages, traditional ecological knowledge, and cultures of multiple communities within and around Santa Cruz (home of Mission Santa Cruz), Martin Rizzo nonetheless offers history on an epic scale. His study is enmeshed in deep time, ecologies, and practices, as well as meticulously engaged with underutilized or overlooked archival sources—particularly those originating from Indigenous archives. Weighing in at nearly five hundred pages and with close to fifty tables, maps, and figures, Rizzo’s work provides the most comprehensive and detailed account to date of the Ohlone experience in what is now the Santa Cruz coastline and mountain range. Although California is home to tech titans with global reach, Native Californians and their histories remain hidden in plain sight. Rizzo’s goal is to cast... You do not currently have access to this content.

The Social Movement Archive

The Social Movement Archive

Reclaiming archives: guest editorial

Abstract 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 seeking to reappropriate their cultural records. The essay finishes by relating the issues outlined above to the articles presented in this issue, which provide perspectives from Australia and internationally regarding Indigenous cultural collections, with special reference to research-based collections of Indigenous music and dance.

Ephemeral Encounters

In this “report from the field,” we write from two perspectives, as a curator and as an advisor, on the process of interpreting Native American documents in the 2016 American Philosophical Society Museum exhibition, “Gathering Voices: Thomas Jefferson and Native America.” We share insights into our curatorial and representational goals, and reflect on the challenges of interpreting Indigenous heritage and traditional knowledges in materials that have been captured in colonial collections. We show how archival documents tend to silence as much as showcase ephemeral encounters, and how power in museum environments often remains embedded within the routine structures of colonial settler institutions and practices. We critique our own exhibition by noting how, despite our best efforts, inherent tensions among Indigenous histories, decolonizing ideals, and colonial archives shaped the process and resulted in irreconcilable omissions. Yet, we argue that cross-cultural collaboration is essential when working in colonial archives. Only by inviting Indigenous people into the process can we make progress toward restoring living relationships among past voices and contemporary communities. In concluding, we offer advice on practical approaches to working with Indigenous collaborators and advisors.

Activating and supporting the Tandanya Adelaide Declaration on Indigenous Archives

ABSTRACT This article discusses opportunities for activating and supporting the International Council on Archives Tandanya – Adelaide Declaration on Indigenous Archives. It discusses the background and context of the Declaration and reflects on pathways for it to be enacted. This article draws from a panel discussion ‘Supporting and Activating the Adelaide Tandanya Declaration on Indigenous Archives’ hosted by the Australian Society of Archivists (ASA) in September 2020. It explores questions of mobilising action to support the Declaration in an Indigenous Australian context. It examines key themes and issues relating to the importance of ongoing dialogue and Indigenous leadership in actioning and expanding the five key themes of the statement of 1) Knowledge authorities 2) Property and ownership 3) Recognition and identity 4) Research and access, and 5) Self-determination. It concludes with a discussion and recommendations for further action to support the activation of the Tandanya – Adelaide Declaration.

The Indigenous Archives Collective position statement on the right of reply to Indigenous knowledges and information held in archives

The Indigenous Archives Collective position statement on the right of reply to Indigenous knowledges and information held in archives

Indigenous Digital Storytelling: Digital Interfaces Supporting Cultural Heritage Preservation and Access

This paper reports on an examination and analysis of digital storytelling interface features and functionalities within a select number of Indigenous digital libraries and archives in order to support and inform the participatory and culturally-informed design and development of a digital storytelling system for the Inuvialuit Settlement Region (ISR) in Canada’s Western Arctic region. This paper provides an introduction to digital storytelling and the use of digital media in Indigenous communities to preserve oral traditions and stories in digital archives. It also presents participatory and inclusive design ideas and examples from Canada, US, and Australia to demonstrate and emphasize the importance of community engagement and community-based archiving for cultural heritage preservation and access.

Incorporation of indigenous archives into Limpopo archives repository: a case of Venda indigenous archives

PurposeThis study aims to assess the Venda indigenous archives incorporation into the Limpopo Provincial archives to promote archives decolonisation.Design/methodology/approachThis research is based on a qualitative research method. Interviews conducted with the 10 Limpopo Provincial Archivists and 25 community leaders based in the Venda area were conducted. The semi-structured interview was used to collect data.FindingsIt is a South African constitutional mandate for each province to manage its archives. As the former Venda was now part of the Limpopo province, its archives were incorporated into the Limpopo Provincial Archives. The Venda archives incorporation to the Limpopo Provincial Archives did not consider the will of a community member to travel a long distance. Furthermore, challenges faced by archivists such as lack of skills and knowledge to process archival materials, lack of funding and participation in the incorporation of archives materials.Research limitations/implicationsThis research confines itself to the Venda indigenous archives created from 1979 to 1993.Practical implicationsThis paper addresses archives decolonisation.Social implicationsThe paper has the potential to demonstrate the value of the indigenous archive.Originality/valueThe study can be replicated for other research practices. This case study can be implemented in other parts of the world that face similar circumstances so regarding the transfer of archives and the challenges faced to maintain community knowledge and make them accessible.

Afterlives of Indigenous Archives: Essays in Honor of “The Occom Circle.” Edited by Ivy Schweitzer and Gordon Henry. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2019. Pp. x+248.

These are questions that, for most archivists, rarely come into play. They are questions, however, that continue to trouble investigations into the Indigenous archives, which, after all, have spectral afterlives, resonances and traces that bear the tragic wisdom of enduring four hundred years of settler colonial violence and yet continue to “resist annihilation.” This pertains to the Occom Circle Project as well, for while it is a superbly conceived and executed resource, one of the better digital archives that I have encountered, it remains housed in the halls of Dartmouth, whose official seal still depicts two naked Indians being pulled, as though by tractor beam, toward the shimmering vision of a giant Christian Bible hovering like the sun over the venerable institution. For those who know Occom’s history and the history of the New England tribes, Dartmouth too is a “fraught space.” This collection opens up a poignant conversation about how scholars, entering into both traditional and digital archives, will have to engage with such spaces and arrive at respectful solutions for dealing with the spectral afterlives of Indigenous archives.

Indigenous Humanity and Early American Archives

Indigenous Humanity and Early American Archives

Gerald Vizenor. <em>Native Provenance: The Betrayal of Cultural Creativity</em>.

This is a critical moment for those who care for Native American and Indigenous archives. After much discussion, debate, and years of tireless advocacy, the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials has finally been endorsed by our leading professional organizations. The Association of College and Research Libraries, following the request of the Rare Books and Manuscript Section (RBMS), endorsed the Protocols in August 2019. In 2018, the Council of the Society of American Archivists unanimously endorsed the Protocols, accompanied by an apology for the many years of inaction. Following these endorsements, the next step for us is not only to continue its promotion and implementation, but also grow our understanding of what it means to be responsible stewards of items in our care. The Protocols articulate foundational concepts for our professional practice, including notions of cultural sensitivity and reciprocity. We can further expand our thinking and practice in this area by engaging with the works of prominent thinkers. Among these is Anishinaabe cultural theorist, writer, and scholar Gerald Vizenor’s most recent book, Native Provenance: The Betrayal of Cultural Creativity.

¿Qué fue primero, el archivo o el fetiche? En torno a los archivos indígenas

Based on the verification of non-alphabetical forms of register and archive in indigenous societies, as well as a definition of the archive as that which provides these heterogeneous registers with readability and effectiveness, the following question arises: how to understand the power of a certain type of objects that seem to base their power on the fact of escaping from codes and representations? We propose a conceptualization of the indigenous archives opposed to the modern figure of the archive as an empty space and destined to the collection and organization of subjected to a representational function. On the contrary, these indigenous archives would function as fetishes in themselves, that is, as montages of registers and objects in which the image of their power and effectiveness is materialized. Finally we see how this type of file corresponds to political forms not based on the modern principle of state sovereignty, but rather oriented towards the production and registration of alliances. In this framework, the notion of mimesis and simulacrum will be used as a condition of this non-state form of organizing power and its archives.

The Site of Memory: Reading Surveillance, Alterity, and South Australia’s Indigenous Archives in Natalie Harkin

Natalie Harkin is a Narungga artist and writer from South Australia, whose recent collection Dirty Words (Cordite Books, 2015) draws Australian Indigenous poetry toward conceptual and procedural methodologies. The archive Harkin utilizes in her conceptual writing stems from The Aboriginal Archive held in South Australian government control. It contains documents that detail the surveillance conducted upon her extended family and specif ically those surveillance records that document the life of her grandmother, collected between 1938 and 1947. This essay examines the claims to sovereign expression in Harkin's poetic, a poetic that seeks manifestly to contest the historical record through a critique of the colonial archive as a site of persuasion. This essay considers Harkin's methodologies as reconstituting and resanguinating the subjective expression, emotion, and voice of those silenced by the dominance of the colonial past. The critique of the archive that Harkin provides frames it a racialized historical construction through which systems of surveillance, control, and dominance were enacted. The constitutive genealogies and systems of power that were used to segregate and to control the conditions of Indigenous life in Australia are contextualized historically and criticized for contributing to the monohistoricizing impulses of colonial empires and using the archive to control the historical narrative and the very def inition of Australian indigeneity.

Saints and Citizens: Indigenous Histories of Colonial Missions and Mexican California

List of Maps and Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Saints and Indigenous Citizens 1. Colonial Settlements on Indigenous Land 2. Becoming Indian in Colonial California 3. The Politics of the Image 4. All the Horses Are in the Possession of the Indians: The Chumash War 5. We Solicit Our Freedom: Citizenship and the Patria 6. Indigenous Landowners and Native Ingenuity on the Borderlands of Northern Mexico Conclusion: Indigenous Archives and Knowledge Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

ATALM annual conference on Indigenous Archives, Libraries, and Museums

Purpose – This paper aims to summarize the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museum’s (ATALM) 7th annual conference events and focus on best practices in indigenous archives, libraries and museums. The city Palm Springs, California, played host to an “eventful” ATALM 2014 international conference which featured diverse range of activities, namely, poem reading from personal collection, melodious flute playing by native players, an open house and cultural evening at a tribal museum, etc. The conference brought together 520 registered delegates from the USA, Canada and Mexico. Design/methodology/approach – This report is an outline of selected ATALM 2014 conference events in Palm Springs based on the theme “Indigenous Archives, Libraries and Museums”. It summarizes selective events, namely, onsite workshops and poster session. Findings – The conference focused on indigenous culture, as the participants discussed challenges and opportunities in sustaining cultural sovereignty of native nations. The hands-on or interactive labs/workshops were centered on the activities and needs of tribal archives, especially on preservation of cultural heritage. As a Fulbright scholar, the author was interested to know about American tribal history, indigenous culture, native archives and libraries, and excited to see the country’s desert scenery. Additionally, ATALM scholarship/financial support encouraged the author to attend the conference, and finally, the heat of the desert which accentuated the beauty of Palm Springs makes a complete experience. Originality/value – The ATALM conferences are the important conference because of the participation of large number of tribal libraries and cultural heritage keeping organizations serving indigenous population. The ATALM 2014 covered areas like successful collaborations between tribal and non-tribal organizations, and building strategic networks among outside and within the communities.

Sovereignty, Repatriation, and the Archival Imagination

Sovereignty is an often invoked, yet notoriously misunderstood and misused term in relation to the political, territorial, cultural and economic needs, aspirations, and goals of Indigenous peoples living in post-colonial settler states. Archives were established as places where official records became anchors for nations in the making as they documented the accepted demise of their first peoples. As a result, the archival imagination is both a process of political work and ideological maneuvering. In the post-colonial imagination, archives have become hotbeds for revising the historical fictions and fantasies that allowed for the erasure and presumed demise of Indigenous peoples. As archives shift to include Indigenous voices, and as Indigenous archives assert their own prominence in the landscape, the archival imagination expands. This article analyzes the emergent archival imagination through the lens of sovereignty, repatriation movements, and digital technologies to expose the place of Indigenous rights, histories, and imaginations in the practical work of archives in post-colonial settler states. Using examples from my own collaborations in the United States and Canada with Indigenous communities and my work as the director of Mukurtu CMS, I examine how multiple stakeholders grapple with and infuse archival practices, tools, and work with the many nuances of sovereignty.

Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies by Chadwick Allen (review)

Reviewed by: Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies by Chadwick Allen Hsinya Huang Allen, Chadwick. 2012. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. $75.00 hc. $25.00 sc.336pp. In Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies, Chadwick Allen develops methodologies for global Indigenous literary studies by challenging us to think beyond the national borders of contemporary (settler) nation-states and to focus on Indigenous-to-Indigenous relationships instead. He reorients understandings of transnationality and indigeneity through juxtaposition of diverse Indigenous texts and, in so doing, provides significant impulses, especially in the fields of Native American and comparative Indigenous studies, ethnic studies, and global cultural studies, which affect the practice and transformation of intellectual work in global/transnational American studies as well as Indigenous studies. In an earlier article, titled “A Transnational Native American Studies? Why Not Studies That Are Trans-Indigenous?,” which he rewrote as the introduction to Trans-Indigenous, Allen reminds us that conventional theories of the transnational operate on a “vertical binary” (2012a, 3) that subordinates Indigenous peoples. As we work toward a new model that Allen calls “trans-Indigenous,” we need “to see [Indigenous texts] on their own complex and evolving terms” (3). In this full-length monograph, Allen prioritizes [End Page 195] “the global Indigenous” (2012b, xvii) by juxtaposing Indigenous texts from Native North America, Aotearoa New Zealand, Hawai‘i, and Australia. The point is to engage these texts into close conversations and to “acknowledge the mobility and multiple interactions of Indigenous peoples, cultures, histories, and texts” (xiv): Allen investigates Indigenous roots in terms of global routes. Trans-Indigenous configures different channels of crossing. It crosses over different fields of inquiries and offers impressive multiperspectivism, which it terms “scholarship across” (xix). It transcends the grids of genre, form, and media and highlights distinct Indigenous aesthetics that mix poetry, photography, sculpture, carving, textile, and live performance, etc.—“making across” (xxii). The language employed transgresses English-centered ideology, for English and Indigenous languages are engaged on equal terms—“reading across” (xxvi). The authors investigated display complex and diverse identities and connections that are not only tribal, intertribal, and transnational, but also “significantly and increasingly trans-Indigenous” (xxxiii)—“identities cross” (xxxi). And, finally, there are complex and innovative patterns of design, thinking, knowledge systems, theories, and intersections, which are marvelously woven to contribute to the trans-Indigenous scholarship—“patterning across” (xxxiii). In addition to the introduction, there are five chapters organized into two parts. The two chapters in part 1, “Recovery/Interpretation,” focus on Indigenous methodologies in order to light new avenues toward a comprehensive understanding of comparative Indigenous studies. They demonstrate how recovering and reclaiming Indigenous texts that have been consigned to oblivion would necessarily reorient and redirect methods of Indigenous literary interpretation. Allen reflects from the vantage point of his intellectual commitment to American Indian literatures, cultures, and scholarship. He sets out to re-vision “The Indian Today,” the Fall 1965 special issue of Midcontinent American Studies, within contemporary international perspectives. The aim is to interrogate how the settler colonialism practiced within the US may be related to US imperialism at large and to “various manifestations of colonialism” (xxxiii) around the globe, thereby setting up the ground for comparative studies of settlers’ dominance and Indigenous struggles in the transnational context. Part 2, “Interpretation/Recovery,” enacts multiple modes of trans-Indigenous juxtaposition across tribes and beyond nations. Allen is keen on revealing the dynamic power of various texts and, by providing careful and thoughtful close readings of Indigenous literature, art, and technology, he reclaims aspects of the Indigenous archives from North America, Hawai‘i, Australia, and New Zealand and engages them into productive conversations. He begins with three readings of N. Scott Momaday’s brief poem “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919,” and associates it with Plains Indian pictographic discourses, and retrieves multimedia events of Native American storytelling. In so doing, he aims to intertwine Indigenous poetics and aesthetics for the interpretation of contemporary Indigenous texts. Using Momaday’s poem as an entry point, in the next chapter he stages multiple juxtapositions of diverse Indigenous texts across historical and geographical [End Page 196] boundaries and across genres and media...

New Indians and Indigenous Archives

Native americans have long been the missing subjects of american literature, either excised from narratives of nation through colonial erasure or limited to the discourse of the “vanishing Indian.” Such marginalization is no longer the case, or at least not to the same extent, particularly for literary studies of national, transnational, and hemispheric constructions of race and citizenship. As critics from Vine Deloria to Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Craig Womack have demonstrated, a wide range of indigenous practices and forms of knowledge must be reclaimed within academic forms of inquiry, representation, and circulation. One strategy for Native American literary studies has been to expand notions of text to include winter counts, wampum, and other forms of material culture. Even with a narrower definition of text, however, the current archive of American Indian literature encompasses such diverse works as early songs and oratory, nineteenth-century poems in Ojibwe and English by Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, a range of boarding school narratives, contemporary graphic novels, and the amplified (digital) poetry of Brandy Nalani McDougall and Craig Santos Perez.

Indigenous medicine and knowledge in African society

At the turn of the 20th century, African societies witnessed the suppression of indigenous healing specialists as missionary proselytization and colonial rule increased. Governments, medical practitioners and academics focused little attention or resources on the production of traditional medicine, despite its potential use for advancing health care delivery to millions of people in rural communities and providing the basis for a medicinal industry. Focusing on the case of Ghana, Indigenous Medicine and Knowledge in African Society investigates the ways in which healers and indigenous archives of cultural knowledge conceptualize and interpret medicine and healing. In order to unearth these prevailing concepts, Konadu utilizes in-depth interviews, plant samples, material culture, linguistics, and other sources. This groundbreaking study of indigenous knowledge has important implications for the study of medical and knowledge systems in Africa and the African Diaspora worldwide. By closely examining a range of multidisciplinary sources and utilizing fieldwork in the Takyiman district of central Ghana, the book contributes a new dimension to the study of health and healing systems in the African context and offers scholars, students, and general readers a vital reference.

Indiginous knowledge archives in a west african society

This article argues that resort to and competency in the deployment of indigenous knowledge archives are a prerequisite rather than a supplement for studying African life and phenomena, and I use the Bono (Akan) of West Africa and a shared dimension of African cultural knowledge — indigenous medicinal knowledge — to elucidate this position. The issue is not that indigenous knowledge has not been valuated inasmuch some revere European archives but rather indigenous archives have been left malnourished and after our hiatus to ‘things Western,' the realization is that the latter can provide its own interpretative perspective on African realities. Indigenous African archives of knowledge ‘have things to say,' which presupposes that these archives have a language that functions as a repository and transmitter of culture — in spiritual, conceptual, and material terms — and serves as a nexus between the life of this language and the life of its speakers. The production of knowledge on indigenous therapeutic or other systems, especially from the perspective of indigenous specialists and the culture in which they are a part, are challenges left in abeyance. The following, therefore, represents an attempt to explore the relationship between indigenous medicine and the proverbial, ‘gold weight,' adinkra symbolism, and oral narrative archives of the Akan. Keywords : Indigenous knowledge archives, indigenous medicinal knowledge, proverbial archives, oral archives. Indilinga Vol. 5 (1) 2006: pp. 12-26