Conundrums and consequences: Doing digital archival returns in Australia
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2019-10
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University of Hawai'i Press
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Abstract
The practices of archival return may provide some measure of social equity to Indigenous Australians. Yet priceless cultural collections, amassed over many decades, are in danger of languishing without ever finding reconnection to the individuals and communities of their origin. The extensive documentary heritage of Australian Indigenous peoples is dispersed, and in many cases participants in the creation of archival records, or their descendants, have little idea of where to find these records. These processes of casting memories of the past into the future bring various conundrums of a social, political, and technical nature. They raise questions about the nature and dynamics of ongoing cultural transmission, the role of institutional and community archives in both protecting records of languages, song and social history and disseminating them, and the responsibilities of researchers, organisations and end users in this complex intercultural space. These questions are perforce framed by ethical and legal questions about access, competing ideas of ownership, and shifting community protocols surrounding rights of access to and the dissemination of cultural information. This paper arises from a project designed to reintegrate such research collections of Central Australian cultural knowledge with the places and communities from which they originally emanated. While we show that the issues raised are seldom neutral and often complex, we also argue for the power that culturally appropriate mobilisation of archival materials has for those that inherit the knowledge they embody.
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Indigenous archives, archival returns, intellectual property, cultural transmission, Central Australia
Citation
Barwick, Linda, Jennifer Green, Petronella Vaarzon-Morel, and Katya Zissermann. "Conundrums and consequences: Doing archival returns in Australia." In Archival returns in Central Australia and beyond, edited by Linda Barwick, Jennifer Green, and Petronella Vaarzon-Morel, 1–27. LD&C Special Publication 18. Honolulu & Sydney: University of Hawai’i Press & Sydney University Press, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24875/.
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