This session consists of 4 presentations and a joint Q&A with the presenters. The session contains:
➺ Christian Poske, Anna Ziya Geerling - Mapping Indigenous Ecological Knowledge and Stories of Belonging in the Eastern Himalayan Region: Community Archiving in Times of the Climate Crisis (Long presentation)
➺ David Walker, Cecilia Peterson - Building Collaborative Indigenous Audiovisual Documentation: A Case Study from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival (Long presentation)
➺ Cristina Sá Valentim - What untold narratives can colonial sound archives reveal? Music, Power, and Resistance in Angola. (Short presentation)
➺ Nadjah Rios villarini, Victor Torres Rodríguez, Tania Ríos Marreo - Participatory Digital Archiving Builds Communities: Lessons from Puerto Rico and the Caribbean (Panel session)
**Abstracts:**
➺ Mapping Indigenous Ecological Knowledge and Stories of Belonging in the Eastern Himalayan Region: Community Archiving in Times of the Climate Crisis
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Christian Poske, Anna Ziya Geerling (Long presentation)
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Unprecedented rapid transformations in the earth’s critical climate regions alarm us all and call for equally unprecedented transformations in educational policies, priorities, and approaches at audiovisual archives located in these regions to critically engage and amplify the voices of local and indigenous communities disproportionately impacted by climate change. As a member institution of the international environmental humanities research and education project ‘Ekologos’ (2022–2026), the Highland Institute in Kohima engages pedagogically with the climate changes affecting the eastern Himalayan region. As part of these efforts, the Institute supports local communities in documenting and safeguarding their traditional ecological knowledges and place-based oral literatures through collaborative research and community archiving initiatives to revitalize and promote awareness about these traditions with an ‘Atlas of Ecological Knowledge’. The resulting recordings will be accessible at the Institute’s audiovisual archive and online via a digital mapping platform, allowing locals, and especially youth, to engage with the ancestral relations to their lands through songs, stories, and myths conveying intimate land relationships and traditional ecological knowledge relevant to maintaining and restoring climate change resilience. An essential component of this investigation into digitizing traditional knowledge is considering intellectual property rights, ethics, and potential hazards such as biopiracy, which the Institute addresses by consulting local communities, IP rights experts, and IT specialists to explore suitable software solutions. In this presentation, we discuss the initiatives the Highland Institute has taken in this field, the challenges encountered, and the planned steps ahead, drawing on insights gained as co-coordinators of the Ekologos project.
➺ Building Collaborative Indigenous Audiovisual Documentation: A Case Study from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival
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David Walker, Cecilia Peterson (Long presentation)
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In 2024, the Smithsonian Institution will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) with a six-day Festival on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The high-resolution audiovisual documentation created during the event will be archived at the Smithsonian, forming a substantial body of ethnographic research material. However, properly creating and stewarding this documentation requires a commitment to cultural respect, acknowledgment of shared ownership of the material, and active collaboration with the traditional bearers represented.
In this presentation, archivists from the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (CFCH) will provide an overview of workflows for creating born-digital documentation and discuss strategies for responsible and ethical stewardship of the material. Specifically, they will describe the need for proactive work with participants to create transparency around the documentation process. Questions to be addressed include: How will the assets be managed? Who may access them, and how will they be used? How does CFCH’s Shared Stewardship Policy apply to this newly created material? In this case study, the archivists will also describe the collaboration process with the NMAI, a leader in the ethical and reparative description of Indigenous materials. They will explore how the resources created by the museum, such as the NMAI Culture Thesaurus, are used to ensure accurate descriptive metadata and how rights and permissions are tracked. By sharing our experiences, we hope this case study can serve as a model for future community-based documentation initiatives, particularly for Indigenous and traditional knowledge.
➺ What untold narratives can colonial sound archives reveal? Music, Power, and Resistance in Angola.
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Cristina Sá Valentim (Short presentation)
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Colonial archives are part of what Valentin Mudimbe called the colonial library. This means that the colonial archives are a set of knowledge that legitimized hierarchical identities of the colonized and the colonizer, which produced subalternity and unequal relations of power. Furthermore, colonial sound archives – mostly neglected in favor of written, visual, and audiovisual historical sources – combine performative, ontological, acoustic, and political dimensions that need to be considered to better understand the complexities of power relations. What colonial sound archives hide, omit and display? What untold narratives can traditional music reveal about colonial power and resistance?
This paper discusses some traditional Cokwe songs related to the colonial mining forced labor at Lunda region. These songs were collected during the Portuguese colonial rule in the 1950s in Angola by the Museu do Dundo of the former diamond mining company – Companhia de Diamantes de Angola (Diamang). Based on ongoing interdisciplinary research between anthropology, history and post-colonial studies, this presentation is built on a collaborative approach that combines colonial archival research and historical-ethnographic fieldwork on memories and shared listening of these songs, in Angola and Portugal. This case study aims to uncover the multiple African voices and practices of agency and resistance, also showing how Portuguese colonial domination was intertwined with Angolan music and culture. Above all, this presentation aims to contribute to the decolonization of African colonial sound collections that remain unstudied and largely unknown, and share some reflections on the challenges related to research into colonial sound archives.
➺ Participatory Digital Archiving Builds Communities: Lessons from Puerto Rico and the Caribbean
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Nadjah Rios villarini, Victor Torres Rodríguez, Tania Ríos Marreo (Panel session)
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This panel explores production and post-production processes as part of the methodology for participatory community archives. From transdisciplinary perspectives, the panelists address fundamental questions such as: who are community archives for and what function do they serve? Based on concrete experiences in Puerto Rico, the presenters describe specific instances of co-creation of archival resources, involving researchers from the University of Puerto Rico affiliated with the UPR Caribbean Digital project, the Digital Library of the Caribbean, and two grassroots community groups spearheading important sociocultural projects on the island: Casa Pueblo and Taller Comunidad La Goyco. The stories of these communities recorded in audiovisual documentation not only reveal the successes and challenges of their struggles but also demonstrate the ability to propose solutions to problems such as gentrification, the use of renewable energy, and the promotion of cultural actions as a cohesive element for the political organization of the members comprising these groups.
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