Afterlives of Indigenous Archives

by Ivy Schweitzer (Editor), Gordon Henry (Editor)

Overview

Afterlives of Indigenous Archives offers a compelling critique of Western archives and their use in the development of “digital humanities.” The essays collected here present the work of an international and interdisciplinary group of indigenous scholars; researchers in the field of indigenous studies and early American studies; and librarians, curators, activists, and storytellers. The contributors examine various digital projects and outline their relevance to the lives and interests of tribal people and communities, along with the transformative power that access to online materials affords. The authors aim to empower native people to re-envision the Western archive as a site of community-based practices for cultural preservation, one that can offer indigenous perspectives and new technological applications for the imaginative reconstruction of the tribal past, the repatriation of the tribal memories, and a powerful vision for an indigenous future. This important and timely collection will appeal to archivists and indigenous studies scholars alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781512603668
Publisher:	Dartmouth College Press
Publication date:	03/01/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

Gordon Henry is professor of creative writing and Native American and American literature at Michigan State University. Ivy Schweitzer is professor of English and women’s and gender studies at Dartmouth College.

Table of Contents

Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Foreword. The Afterlives of the Archive Acknowledgments���������������������� Introduction. “The Afterlives of Indigenous Archives” Part I. Critiques One. The Role of Indigenous Communities in Building Digital Archives Two. From Time Immemorial: Centering Indigenous Traditional Knowledge and Ways of Knowing in the Archival Paradigm Three. Decolonizing the Imperialist Archive: Translating Cherokee Manuscripts Four. Caretaking Around Collecting and the Digital Turn: Lessons in Ongoing Opportunities and Challenges from the Native Northeast Part II. Methods Five. New Methods, New Schools, New Stories: Digital Archives and Dartmouth’s Institutional Legacy Six. Entangled Archives: Cherokee Interventions in Language Collecting Seven. Recovering Indigenous Kinship: Community, Conversion, and the Digital Turn Eight. Reading Tipâcimôwin and the Receding Archive Nine. Re-incurating Tribal Skins: Re-imagining the Native Archive, Re-stor(y)ing the Tribal Imagi(Native) Part III. Interventions Ten. The Occom Circle at Dartmouth College Library Eleven. The Audio of Text: Art of Tradition Twelve. Writing the Digital Codex: Non/Alphabetic, De/Colonial, Network/ed Thirteen. An Orderly Assemblage of Biases: Troubling the Monocultural Stack About the Contributors����������������������������� Index������������

Editorial Reviews

This collection brings together cutting-edge research and thoughtful commentary on what it really means to create indigenous-centered archives in the digital age. The contributors ask difficult questions and pose innovative responses about access to and interpretation of cultural collections often unavailable to the very tribal Nations which created them. Afterlives of Indigenous Archives is a must-have resource for community members and scholars who not only want to work with archives that hold our communal objects and stories, but also want to center their contexts in a framework of traditional knowledge and collaboration.

Gwen N. Westerman

"Afterlives, nevertheless, responds to a recent turn to the archive in Indigenous studies—a movement that found its impetus in an emerging generation of Native scholars. . . . 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."

Modern Philology