Redressing Archival Harm: Ownership, Access, and Indigenous Knowledge

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Oral histories
• Indigenous knowledge
• archives
• ethics
• access

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

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4. Genovese, “Decolonizing Archival Methodology.”

5. Jane Anderson, and Kimberly Christen, “Decolonizing Attribution: Traditions of Exclusion,” Journal of Radical Librarianship 5 (2019): 113–52, https://www.journal.radicallibrarianship.org/index.php/journal/article/view/38.

6. See Ry Moran, “Indigenous People Should Decide on Matters of Access to Archival Information,” International Journal of Circumpolar Health 75, no. 1 (2016): 32593, doi: 10.3402/ijch.v75.32593%40zich20.2016.75.issue-S3; Kirsten Thorpe. “The Dangers of Libraries and Archives for Indigenous Australian Workers: Investigating the Question of Indigenous Cultural Safety.” IFLA Journal 47, no. 3 (2021): 341–50, doi: 10.1177/0340035220987574.

7. We are approaching this work from the positionality of White library professionals. Evangeline Giaconia, at the time of writing, was a graduate student working as intern on this project. Ginessa Mahar and Perry Collins are the Anthropology librarian and the Copyright & Open Educational Resources Librarian, respectively, at UF. As of Fall 2021, less than 0.2% of students at the University of Florida identified as Native American or Alaska Native.

8. The University of Florida is located on the ancestral lands of the Potano and the unceded lands of the Seminole peoples. https://uflib.ufl.edu/about/user-policies/land-acknowledgment/.

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19. Originating Community Partners involved in the project: the Catawba Indian Nation, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, the Poarch Creek Band of Indians, and the Seminole Tribe of Florida. Data regarding their collections within the present paper are limited out of respect to our partners’ privacy as this project continues.

20. Grant proposal: https://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00087916/00001/citation.

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28. Tuhiwai-Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 29.

29. Ibid., 63.

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38. See note 30 above.

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46. Gregory Younging, “The Traditional Knowledge – Intellectual Property Interface,” in Indigenous Notions of Ownership in Libraries, Archives, and Museums, ed. Camille Callison, Loriene Roy, and Gretchen Alice LeCheminant (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2016), 72.

47. Kimberly Christen, “A Safe Keeping Place: Mukurtu CMS Innovating Museum Collaborations,” in Technology and Digital Archives: Innovative Approaches for Museums, ed. Juilee Decker (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015): 61–68.

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50. Anderson and Christen, “Decolonizing Attribution.”

51. Ibid.

52. Angela Riley, “Recovering Collectivity: Group Rights to Intellectual Property in Indigenous Communities,” Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal 18 (2000): 175–226, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/caelj18&i=183.

53. Charles E. Trimble, Barbara W. Sommer, and Mary Kay. Quinlan, The American Indian Oral History Manual: Making Many Voices Heard (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2008).

54. Indri Pasaribu, “Indigenous Digital Oral History: An Overview,” in Indigenous Notions of Ownership in Libraries, Archives, and Museums, ed. Camille Callison, Loriene Roy, and Gretchen Alice LeCheminant (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2016), 325–43.

55. Candace S. Green and Thomas D. Drescher, “The Tipi with Battle Pictures: The Kiowa Tradition of Intangible Property Rights,” The Trademark Reporter 84, no. 4 (1994): 418–33, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/thetmr84&i=438.

56. Reed, “Who Owns Our Ancestors’ Voices?”

57. “TK Labels,” Local Contexts, https://localcontexts.org/labels/traditional-knowledge-labels/ (accessed October 15, 2022).

Additional information

Funding

This work supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries.