Afterlives of Indigenous Archives by Ivy Schweitzer (Editor); Gordon Henry (Editor) 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.

Assembled for Use by Kelly Wisecup A wide-ranging, multidisciplinary look at Native American literature through non-narrative texts like lists, albums, recipes, and scrapbooks   "An intricate history of Native textual production, use, and circulation that reshapes how we think about relationships between Native materials and settler-colonial collections."--Rose Miron, D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library   Kelly Wisecup offers a sweeping account of early Native American literatures by examining Indigenous compilations: intentionally assembled texts that Native people made by juxtaposing and recontextualizing textual excerpts into new relations and meanings. Experiments in reading and recirculation, Indigenous compilations include Mohegan minister Samson Occom's medicinal recipes, the Ojibwe woman Charlotte Johnston's poetry scrapbooks, and Abenaki leader Joseph Laurent's vocabulary lists. Indigenous compilations proliferated in a period of colonial archive making, and Native writers used compilations to remake the very forms that defined their bodies, belongings, and words as ethnographic evidence. This study enables new understandings of canonical Native writers like William Apess, prominent settler collectors like Thomas Jefferson and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, and Native people who contributed to compilations but remain absent from literary histories. Long before current conversations about decolonizing archives and museums, Native writers made and circulated compilations to critique colonial archives and foster relations within Indigenous communities.

Indigenous Archival Activism by Rose Miron Who has the right to represent Native history?   The past several decades have seen a massive shift in debates over who owns and has the right to tell Native American history and stories. For centuries, non-Native actors have collected, stolen, sequestered, and gained value from Native stories and documents, human remains, and sacred objects. However, thanks to the work of Native activists, Native history is now increasingly being repatriated back to the control of tribes and communities. Indigenous Archival Activism takes readers into the heart of these debates by tracing one tribe's fifty-year fight to recover and rewrite their history.   Rose Miron tells the story of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation and their Historical Committee, a group of mostly Mohican women who have been collecting and reorganizing historical materials since 1968. She shows how their work is exemplary of how tribal archives can be used strategically to shift how Native history is accessed, represented, written and, most importantly, controlled. Based on a more than decade-long reciprocal relationship with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation, Miron's research and writing is shaped primarily by materials found in the tribal archive and ongoing conversations and input from the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee.   As a non-Mohican, Miron is careful to consider her own positionality and reflects on what it means for non-Native researchers and institutions to build reciprocal relationships with Indigenous nations in the context of academia and public history, offering a model both for tribes undertaking their own reclamation projects and for scholars looking to work with tribes in ethical ways.

Indigenous Archives by Darren Jorgensen (Editor); Ian McLean (Editor) In recording and ordering documents considered important, the archive is a source of power. It takes control of the past, deciding which voices will be heard and which won't, how they will be heard and for what purpose. Indigenous communities understood the power of the archive well before the European Enlightenment arrived and began recording information about the people they colonized. For these Indigenous people, colonialism has been a struggle over archives as much as anything else. The eighteen essays by twenty authors, seven of whom are Indigenous, investigate different aspects of this struggle in Australia, from Indigenous uses of traditional archives and the development of new ones to the deconstruction and appropriation of European archives by contemporary artists as acts of cultural empowerment. Indigenous Archives also examines the uses of archives that were developed for other reasons, but can be used as a means to reconstruct the lives of artists and the meanings of their art, such as the use of rainfall records to interpret early Papunya paintings. This book is the first overview examining the role of archives in the production and understanding of Indigenous culture. Wide-ranging in its scope, it reveals the lively state of research into Indigenous histories and culture in Australia. [Subject: Art History, Cultural Studies, Indigenous Studies, Sociology]

Stories of Our Living Ephemera by Emily Legg Stories of Our Living Ephemera recovers the history of the Cherokee National Seminaries from scattered archives and colonized research practices by critically weaving together pedagogy and archival artifacts with Cherokee traditional stories and Indigenous worldviews. This unique text adds these voices to writing studies history and presents these stories as models of active rhetorical practices of assimilation resistance in colonized spaces.   Emily Legg turns to the Cherokee medicine wheel and cardinal directions as a Cherokee rhetorical discipline of knowledge making in the archives, an embodied and material practice that steers knowledge through the four cardinal directions around all relations. Going beyond historiography, Legg delineates educational practices that are intertwined with multiple strands of traditional Cherokee stories that privilege Indigenous and matriarchal theoretical lenses. Stories of Our Living Ephemera synthesizes the connections between contemporary and nineteenth-century academic experiences to articulate the ways that colonial institutions and research can be Indigenized by centering Native American sovereignty.   By undoing the erasure of Cherokee literacy and educational practices, Stories of Our Living Ephemera celebrates the importance of storytelling, especially for those who are learning about Indigenous histories and rhetorics. This book is of cultural importance and value to academics interested in composition and pedagogy, the Cherokee Nation, and a general audience seeking to learn about Indigenous rhetorical devices and Cherokee history.  

Unsettling Archival Research by Gesa E. Kirsch (Editor); Romeo García (Editor); Caitlin Burns Allen (Editor); Walker P. Smith (Editor); Jean Bessette (Contribution by); Wendy Hayden (Contribution by); Jacqueline Michele James (Contribution by); Kalyn Prince (Contribution by); Kathryn Manis (Contribution by); Patricia Anne Wilde (Contribution by); Lynée Lewis Gaillet (Contribution by); Jessica Alcorn Rose (Contribution by); María P. Carvajal Regidor (Contribution by); Sally Fisher Benson (Contribution by); Pamela Takayoshi (Contribution by); Liz Rohan (Contribution by); Tarez Samra Graban (Contribution by); Jennifer Marie Almjeld (Contribution by); Rebecca Schneider (Contribution by); Deborah R. Hollis (Contribution by); Amy J. Lueck (Contribution by); Nadia-Katherine Ghazi Nasr (Contribution by) HONORABLE MENTION, 2024 Conference on College Composition and Communication Outstanding Book Award in Edited Collection! A collection of accessible, interdisciplinary essays that explore archival practices to unsettle traditional archival theories and methodologies.   What would it mean to unsettle the archives? How can we better see the wounded and wounding places and histories that produce absence and silence in the name of progress and knowledge? Unsettling Archival Research sets out to answer these urgent questions and more, with essays that chart a more just path for archival work.   Unsettling Archival Research is one of the first publications in rhetoric and writing studies dedicated to scholarship that unsettles disciplinary knowledge of archival research by drawing on decolonial, Indigenous, antiracist, queer, and community perspectives. Written by established and emerging scholars, essays critique not only the practices, ideologies, and conventions of archiving, but also offer new tactics for engaging critical, communal, and digital archiving within and against systems of power. Contributors reflect on efforts to unsettle and counteract racist, colonial histories, confront the potentials and pitfalls of common archival methodologies, and chart a path for the future of archival research otherwise. Unsettling Archival Research intervenes in a critical issue: whether the discipline's assumptions about the archives serve or fail the communities they aim to represent and what can be done to center missing voices and perspectives. The aim is to explore the ethos and praxis of bearing witness in unsettling ways, carried out as a project of queering and/or decolonizing the archives.   Unsettling Archival Research takes seriously the rhetorical force of place and wrestles honestly with histories that still haunt our nation, including the legacies of slavery, colonial violence, and systemic racism.  

Boundless by Lisa A. Crossman (Editor); Heid E. Erdrich (Editor) Boundless expands conversations on Native and Indigenous art and literature by presenting words and images in kinship. Starting in the collections of the Mead Art Museum and the Collection of Native American Literature at Amherst College and centered on the creative production of Native peoples of the Northeast, the project follows relationships between Indigenous authors and artists across the United States and beyond borders. Boundless presents an engagement of Indigenous curatorial methods as practiced by guest curator Heid E. Erdrich (Ojibwe) in an exhibition in two iterations hosted by the Mead in 2023 and 2024. Advisors to Boundless include Mohegan, Nipmuc, Shinnecock, and Wampanoag artists and scholars, along with others, who supported Erdrich in her urge to center the project in the Northeast. Advisors contributed both visual art and writing to the exhibition and publication. Collaborative co-creation between artists, students, faculty, Mead staff Lisa Crossman and Emily Potter-Ndiaye and the guest curator are also explored in this illustrated volume. Amherst College's Collection of Native American Literature contains thousands of Indigenous-authored works spanning centuries. The Collection's abundance of books, prints, music, ephemera, and artist-made works, all by Native people, provide rich selections for Boundless. Crosscurrents of Indigenous visual art and literature are considered in this broad and interdisciplinary project. Boundless crosses generations to explore relatedness, kinship, and collegiality. Boundless brings artists and writers together across generations, often drawing together works by members of the same tribe or even the same family to show the history, presence, and futurity of Native American creative and intellectual production.

Making History by Institute of Institute of American Indian Arts; Nancy Marie Mithlo (Editor); Robert Martin (Foreword by) Making History: IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts is a unique contribution to the fields of visual culture, arts education, and American Indian studies. Written by scholars actively producing Native art resources, this book guides readers--students, educators, collectors, and the public--in how to learn about Indigenous cultures as visualized in our creative endeavors. By highlighting the rich resources and history of the Institute of American Indian Arts, the only tribal college in the nation devoted to the arts whose collections reflect the full tribal diversity of Turtle Island, these essays present a best-practices approach to understanding Indigenous art from a Native-centric point of view. Topics include biography, pedagogy, philosophy, poetry, coding, arts critique, curation, and writing about Indigenous art. Featuring two original poems, ten essays authored by senior scholars in the field of Indigenous art, nearly two hundred works of art, and twenty-four archival photographs from the IAIA's nearly sixty-year history, Making History offers an opportunity to engage the contemporary Native Arts movement.

Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America by Beverly Lemire (Editor); Laura Peers (Editor); Anne Whitelaw (Editor) Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America explores how close, collaborative looking can discern the traces of contact, exchange, and movement of objects and give them a life and political power in complex cross-cultural histories. Red River coats, prints of colonial places and peoples, Indigenous-made dolls, and an Englishwoman's collection provide case studies of art and material culture that correct and give nuance to global and imperial histories. The result of a collaborative research process involving Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors, this book looks closely at the circumstances of making, use, and circulation of these objects: things that supported and defined both Indigenous resistance and colonial and imperial purposes. Contributors re-envision the histories of northern North America by focusing on the lives of things flowing to and from this vast region between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, showing how material culture is a critical link that tied this diverse landscape to the wider world. An original perspective on the history of northern North American peoples grounded in things, Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America provides a key analytical and methodological lens that exposes the complexity of cultural encounters and connections between local and global communities.

Preoccupied by Dare Turner (Editor); Leila Grothe (Editor) Interrogates the colonial underpinnings of museums Published on the occasion of the "Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum" initiative at the Baltimore Museum of Art, this book centers Native artist voices and challenges collective understandings of Native peoples' pivotal role in North American history. The written and visual contributions address and refute the oppressive and pervasive hierarchies of colonialism upon which museums are based. The book features essays by heather ahtone (Chickasaw / Choctaw), Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche), and John Lukavic; newly commissioned poetry by Heid E. Erdrich (Ojibwe); a comic conceived, written, and illustrated by Weyodi Old Bear (Comanche), Dale Deforest (Diné), and Lee Francis IV (Pueblo of Laguna); and transcripts of roundtable discussions with contemporary Native artists. Fifty plates spanning a range of media from monographic and thematic exhibitions showcase both historically significant works from the BMA's collection and the works of living artists, many of whom offer their perspectives in the catalog, including Julie Buffalohead (Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma), Dana Claxton (Lakota First Nations-Wood Mountain), Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit and Unangax̂), Duane Linklater (Omaskêko Ininiwak), Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Lakota / Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold), Alan Michelson (Mohawk / Six Nations of the Grand River), Caroline Monnet (Anishinaabe/French), Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache), Kevin Pourier (Oglala Sioux), Rose B. Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo), Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee Indian), and Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota). The work offers an important contribution to current global conversations around the decolonization of museums.

Reenvisioning Histories of American Art by Jami C. Powell (Editor); Michael Hartman (Editor); Laura Kina (Series edited by) How museums are changing to embrace a more inclusive vision of American art US museums have faced increasing pressure to reckon with their histories in light of movements against racism, violence, and the erosion of human rights here and abroad. Self-reflection and transformation have emerged in tandem with a focus on incorporating antiracism and decolonization in museum practice. Fundamental to these shifts is the idea that one cannot tell the story of American art without Native American, African American, Asian American, and Latinx art. Featuring innovative scholarship and approaches from art history, anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, history, and ethnic studies, the curators and scholars in this volume write about transforming theory and methodology into museum practice as they reflect on the challenges and possibilities for expanding the canon of American art. Beyond the shortcomings of traditional curatorial approaches, they demonstrate how sustained dialogue, community engagement, and curatorial collaboration have fueled important changes to art curation. A progress report and a how-to guide, this collection considers the flawed past and inclusive future for how American art is displayed and taught.

This Is Our Life by Cara Krmpotich; Laura Peers In September 2009, twenty-one members of the Haida Nation went to Oxford and London to work with several hundred heritage treasures at the Pitt Rivers Museum and the British Museum. The encounter set a new course for the relationships between the custodians of these cultural artifacts and the Indigenous people for whom the objects are a direct link to their past. Emotional and illuminating, tense and challenging, it was a transformative visit that none would soon forget. Featuring contributions from Haida and museum participants and a rich selection of illustrations, This Is Our Life details the remarkable story of the Haida Project. A fascinating look at the meaning behind objects, the value of repatriation, and the impact of historical trajectories like colonialism, this is also a tender story of the understanding that grew between the Haida visitors and museum staff. Beautifully written and illustrated, This Is Our Life offers a compelling view of the transformative potential of a conversation hundreds of years in the making.

Unsettling Canadian Art History by Erin Morton (Editor) Bringing together fifteen scholars of art and culture, Unsettling Canadian Art History addresses the visual and material culture of settler colonialism, enslavement, and racialized diasporas in the contested white settler state of Canada.This collection offers new avenues for scholarship on art, archives, and creative practice by rethinking histories of Canadian colonialisms from Black, Indigenous, racialized, feminist, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit perspectives. Writing across many positionalities, contributors offer chapters that disrupt colonial archives of art and culture, excavating and reconstructing radical Black, Indigenous, and racialized diasporic creation and experience. Exploring the racist frameworks that continue to erase histories of violence and resistance, this book imagines the expansive possibilities of a decolonial future.Unsettling Canadian Art History affirms the importance of collaborative conversations and work in the effort to unsettle scholarship in Canadian art and culture.