LD&C Special Publication No. 18: Archival Returns: Central Australia and Beyond

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Abbreviations
(University of Hawai'i Press, 2019-10)
Contributors
(University of Hawai'i Press, 2019-10)
Foreword
(University of Hawai'i Press, 2019-10)
Contents
(University of Hawai'i Press, 2019-10)
Front matter
(University of Hawai'i Press, 2019-10)
Cover
(University of Hawai'i Press, 2019-10)
Ever-widening circles: Consolidating and enhancing Wirlomin Noongar archival material in the community
(University of Hawai'i Press, 2019-10) Clint Bracknell; Kim Scott
Returning archival documentation of endangered Indigenous languages to their community of origin can provide empowering opportunities for Indigenous people to control, consolidate, enhance and share their cultural heritage with ever-widening, concentric circles of people, while also allowing time and space for communities to recover from disempowerment and dislocation. This process aligns with an affirming narrative of Indigenous persistence that, despite the context of colonial dispossession, can lead to a positive, self-determined future. In 2007, senior Noongar of the Wirlomin clan in the south coast region of Western Australia initiated Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Inc., an organisation set up to facilitate cultural and linguistic revitalisation by combining community-held knowledge with documentation and recordings repatriated from the archives. Fieldnotes created in 1931 from discussions with local Aboriginal people at Albany, Western Australia have inspired the collaborative production of six illustrated bilingual books. Working with archival research material has presented challenges due to issues of orthography and legibility in written records, the poor quality of audio recordings, and the incomplete documentation of elicitation sessions. As the archive is so fragmentary, community knowledge is vital in making sense of its contents.
i-Tjuma: The journey of a collection – from documentation to delivery
(University of Hawai'i Press, 2019-10) Elizabeth Marrkilyi Ellis; Jennifer Green; Inge Kral
In 2018, a collection of some 60 edited and subtitled films, resulting from a documentation project (2012–2018) in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands on verbal arts of the Western Desert, was ready to be returned to the Ngaanyatjarra community. In this case study, we describe the journey of this return and the cultural, ethical, and technological issues that we negotiated in the process. From the archived collection lodged with PARADISEC (Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures), we developed a workflow that harvested selected media and their associated metadata and transferred them to LibraryBox, a portable digital file distribution tool designed to enable local delivery of media via the LibraryBox Wi-Fi hotspot. We detail here the return of the curated collection in a series of community film festivals in the Ngaanyatjarra communities and via the delivery of media from LibraryBox to individual mobile phones. We also discuss the return of a digital collection of historical photographs of Ngaanyatjarra people and strategies to re-inscribe such old records for new purposes. These endeavours are motivated by the imperative to ‘mobilise’ our collection of Western Desert Verbal Arts by making the recordings available to the Ngaanyatjarra community. We anticipate that the lessons we learnt in the process will contribute to better design for local solutions in the iterative cycle of documentation, archiving, and return.
Nura's vision: Nura's voice
(University of Hawai'i Press, 2019-10) Suzanne Bryce; Julia Burke; Linda Rive
For Nura Nungalka Ward (1942–2013) the art of teaching was a lifelong passion, culminating in Ninu grandmothers’ law, published by Magabala Books (2018). This autobiography is an extensive ethnography of daily life for Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara families still living on their traditional lands amid the profound changes brought by the arrival of white settlers, doggers, missionaries and atomic bomb tests. Nura’s achievement – compiling her life history illustrated with striking photographs into an English language autobiography – seems like a natural progression. Until you consider that Nura spoke and taught in Pitjantjatjara, her Aṉangu (Aboriginal) language from the remote northwest corner of South Australia, and the fact that she possessed no family photograph albums. How did she make that leap, way beyond her life experience in an oral storytelling tradition, to embrace the idea of a book? How did the return of archival records to Nura’s kin via a digital repository in the early 2000s help shape Nura’s memories? This chapter details Nura’s process: her compelling drive to teach and her willingness to embrace new technologies, such as the digital archive Aṟa Irititja, which she first used to record her knowledge and then drew on to achieve her ambitions. We discuss the complexities that occur when accessing the digital content and Nura’s vigilance in ensuring that she broke no cultural rules in the process. We also share Nura’s decade-long journey as she collaborated with three non-Aboriginal friends to move her spoken word story through the digital archive and into the printed form, in what is the most significant publication to date to be sourced through the Aṟa Irititja Project.
Never giving up: Negotiating, culture-making, and the infinity of the archive
(University of Hawai'i Press, 2019-10) Sabra Thorner; Linda Rive; John Dallwitz; Janet Inyika
Archival returns are a significant issue of concern for Indigenous peoples in many settler-colonial contexts. This chapter focuses on one example from Central Australia, Aṟa Irititja, to reflect on how an archive might simultaneously preserve ‘culture’ and also reflect, accommodate, and inspire cultural change. We feature the words of an Aṉangu ‘senior law woman’, Janet Inyika (affectionately known as Mrs Never-Give-Up), and our co-authorship is consistent with this community archive’s commitment to co-production, yet also extends Inyika’s social justice work into the future. Together, we argue that a collaborative, intercultural approach to archiving, in conjunction with the affordances of digital media, facilitate negotiations that are culturally appropriate, and not threatening. Aṟa Irititja is inspiring the production of a new genre of archival metadata: advance directives on what to do with representations of a person upon his/her death. These words are urging a shift in protocols for the correct treatment of photographs, asserting new domains of individual authority, and establishing the archive as the proper medium through which these should occur. The archive is also a site through which culture-making is never complete, always ongoing – indeed, infinite.

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