Archival repositories don’t often hold materials created or authored by Indigenous peoples. Some archival repositories don’t even have many materials written by colonizers about Indigenous peoples. So how do archivists do outreach and programming to include Indigenous perspectives, if these perspectives aren’t in our archives? In this session, Jenny DeRocher and Henry Greengrass will tell the story of how they started working together, the projects they’ve collaborated on, and the lessons they’ve learned together, and give tips on how to conduct projects in your own institution that focus on Indigenous perspectives instead of the colonizers’ because our collections do that enough for us.
Since 2022, Jenny DeRcoher and Henry Greengrass have collaborated on various projects, including: two video podcast productions featuring Indigenous voices, research and presentations on the myths of community founders, a scavenger hunt featuring local Indigenous history, a circulating library collection of books by Indigenous authors, an Indigenous film series, and education outreach at community events like Indigenous Peoples’ Day and a Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women 5k. During these projects, they learned a number of lessons together and in this session will give examples of how they problem-solved, what allyship vs. co-conspiratorship looks like, and how they fought institutional systems that worked against their projects.
This is a session of advice for archivists who want to do similar projects with decolonized mindsets.
