Autonomous archives

Abstract

By providing evidence for the creation and continuation of claims to identities and places, archives facilitate the participation of multiple publics in dominant cultural and political domains. In the context of fluctuating relations between competing and unequal publics in contested narratives and spaces, the means to control representations of documents determines the ways in which groups are able to participate in the present and influence the future. While government archives have attempted to include and incorporate diverse histories, many social justice organisations and social movements have chosen to operate outside of this framework by preserving the records of their own activities. This article theorises a concept of ‘autonomous archives’ as a crucial component of democratic heritage practices. It develops this notion through an exploration of archives that have emerged within marginalised publics in Vancouver, Canada: the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs Archives, the Hope in Shadows Archive, and Friends of the Woodward's Squat Archive. Each of these archives point to the intersecting concerns of social identity, claims to place, and the political stakes of representation within heterogeneous and unequal publics. They also suggest the significance of archives in the formation of publics, within the broader context of cultural memory and democratic participation.

Keywords:

• archives
• public memory
• public spheres
• emergent publics
• social movements
• social justice
• identity formation

Notes

1. Note that we capitalise ‘Public’ to refer to officially sanctioned sites, practices and discourses.

2. Although this designation is disputed, see for example an article in a national newspaper that describes the Downtown Eastside as ‘a harrowing display of human desperation’, and ‘a world of misery crammed into 10 blocks’ (Matas and Peritz 2008). For a critique of these perspectives, see Sommers and Blomley (2002).

3. See Union of BC Indian Chiefs http://www.ubcic.bc.ca/issues/transformativechange.htm for an example of involvement in government negotiations.

4. Providing access via the Internet is particularly important for British Columbian Aboriginal communities which are widely dispersed. Although Internet access is a barrier in very remote communities, there is typically a shorter distance to travel to a computer than to the archives itself. Furthermore, the Union is a well‐known organisation; thus, less Internet‐savvy members may be inclined to use its website as a source of trusted information than that of a government archives.

5. Community Health Online Digital Archive Research Resource (CHODARR) is currently active in cataloguing, digitising and publishing the records of British Columbian organisations with an emphasis on health and social welfare which otherwise would not be publicly available. See http://harvesters.sfu.ca/chodarr/.

6. For other descriptions, see: Hope in Shadows, http://www.hopeinshadows.com/calendar%2008/index.htm.

7. See for example the UNESCO Archives Portal, http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=5761&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html, the Canadian Council of Archives Directory of Archives, http://www.cdncouncilarchives.ca/directory.html, or the Directory of Community Archives in the UK, http://www.communityarchives.org.uk/index.aspx.