S36 - Protocols 101: How to Start the Conversation at Your Institution

Thank you for joining us today for this session, Protocols 101: How to Start the Conversation at Your Institution, presented by the Native American Archives Section. I'm Caitlin, the current chair of the SAA's Native American Archives Section, and today I'm joined by a few of my colleagues on this committee: Rose Buchanan, my vice chair; Diana Marsh, one of our steering committee members; Jonathan Pringle, another steering committee member and one of our past chairs; Nicole Topic, another steering committee member; Steven Carley, our most immediate past chair and a steering committee member; and then also Melissa Stoner. We will all be speaking during this presentation, sharing different aspects of this session with all of you.

So, I'll let my colleagues introduce themselves a little bit more further on. Before we get started, we do want to take a moment to acknowledge that we are on the traditional lands of multiple Native nations, as our team is currently spread around North America for this virtual presentation. In Maryland, Washington D.C., Ontario, Canada, Albuquerque and Shiprock, New Mexico, Berkeley, California, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, and New York, New York, we recognize these places as the traditional territories of the Piscataway, Nanticoke, sorry, excuse me, Ojibwe, Cree, Pueblo of Sandia, Diné Nation, Mdewakanton Dakota, and the Munsee Lenape Nations, respectively.

The Native American Archives Section, originally founded in 2005 as the Native American Archives Roundtable, was established to serve as a forum to educate archivists on the complexities and beauty of Native American archives of the Western Hemisphere and as a source of communication and inspiration for archivists working with Native American collections. You can explore more about the history of our section on our website here, which is also linked later in the presentation.

During this session, we are going to explore the future of Indigenous collection stewardship for the 21st-century archivist; discuss ways that our institute, your institution, can prepare for proactive communications with tribal communities; offer examples of institutions that have successfully implemented elements of the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials. Much of our discussions today will center around a current NAS project, funded by the Society of American Archivist Foundation, in which we are collaborating with archivists around the country to create webinars and additional resources outlining best practices, action items, and real-world examples for non-Native institutions and archivists working with Native American archival materials and collaborating with tribal communities represented in their collections. As we move forward this year, we will be adding to this project, so we hope that you will stay tuned for additional details. But we're going to be focusing on the first few aspects of the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials that our work thus far has centered on.

So now, I will turn the session on the so-called microphone over to our vice chair, Rose Buchanan, from the National Archives, to introduce the protocols to us.

All right, thank you, Caitlin, and thank you everyone for joining us. So, the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials, you all refer to them as the Protocols or P-NAM, offer best practices for culturally responsive care and use of Native American archival materials held by non-tribal organizations. The Protocols were drafted in 2006 by a group of Native American and non-Native American archivists, librarians, museum curators, historians, and anthropologists who gathered at Northern Arizona University's Cline Library in Flagstaff, Arizona. The group represented 15 Native American, First Nation, Indigenous, and Aboriginal communities.

So, the overarching themes of the Protocols are shown here on the screen. They include the fact that these, uh, they recognize the sovereign governments and associated rights of Native American communities, and the recognitions they make are grounded in and founded on this record, on this recognition. They address issues in the collection, ownership, preservation, handling, access, and use of or restrictions to these materials and center Native American communities in discussions about these issues. They highlight the importance of building relationships, balancing different approaches to knowledge management, and mutual respect when caring for and providing access to Native American collections, and they emphasize the need to expand the nature of the information professions to include Native American perspectives and knowledge.

So, the Protocols are not meant to be prescriptive. They recognize the diversity of communities, institutions, and collections, and the fact that one size may not fit all. They are intended to foster increased cooperation between tribal and non-tribal institutions and those who work in them, and to present tangible goals to which we all can aspire. So, you can see here the link on the Protocols are hosted online by Northern Arizona University, and we will be touching on a couple of different chapters of the Protocols today, but we highly encourage you all to visit the website and view the Protocols in full.

Next slide, please. So, since they were drafted in 2006, the Protocols have been endorsed by multiple organizations, including the Native American Archives Section. SAA Council finally endorsed the Protocols as an external standard in August of 2018. What this means is that SAA fully recognizes and supports the best practices outlined in the Protocols, and SAA members have an ethical responsibility to be aware of and work toward implementing the Protocols.

Next slide. The Protocols consist of 10 chapters covering relationship building, accessibility and use, culturally sensitive materials, and other topics. A full list is on the screen. NAS has created a markup of the Protocols to help you and your institution talk about and consider different tenets of them. This document is available on the NAS community page on the Sustainable Heritage Network's website. We'll have a link to that later in the presentation. Today, we will specifically focus on Chapters 1 and 2 of the Protocols: Building Relationships to Mutual Respect and Striving for Balance in Content and Perspectives, as well as Chapter 5: Providing Context by Centering Indigenous Voices.

So now, I'll turn things over to Nicole and Jonathan, who will talk about Chapter 1, Building Relationships of Mutual Respect.

Thank you, Rose. As Rose stated, we're first going to go over Chapter 1 of the Protocols, Building Relationships of Mutual Respect. One of the key themes from this chapter is that libraries and archives must recognize that Native American communities have primary rights for all culturally sensitive materials that are culturally affiliated with them. These rights apply to issues of collection, preservation, access, and use of or restrictions to these materials. Another key theme from this chapter is that building relationships with Native communities ensures the respectful care and use of archival material. Meaningful consultation and concurrence are essential to establishing mutually beneficial practices and trust.

So, a few action items to draw from this chapter include: Step 1, know the scope of the Indigenous collections at your institution. Step 2, identify appropriate entities to contact to facilitate consultation about these collections. And Step 3, develop Memorandums of Understanding, known as MOUs, or other agreements with tribal communities to honor commitments made during consultations.

So, for Step 1, knowing the scope of your Indigenous collections, it's really just a straightforward step of creating a spreadsheet and inventory of the materials at your institution. So, if you want to learn more about doing a cultural audit, we have a video on the Sustainable Heritage Network site that's from Nicholas Weichik, who is the archivist and collections manager for the Sam Noble Museum in Oklahoma. He did a full-day workshop on this topic. And for Step 2, for contacting appropriate entities to facilitate consultation, there are several organizations to reach out to, including the ATON Network, the American Indian Library Association, and the searchable Tribal Leaders Directory that's online. Oh, there's the logo. And then for Step 3, um, developing MOUs and agreements to honor commitments, um, that's really just taking the straightforward but important step of putting the agreement in writing so that everything is clear, the plan and process are clear to everyone involved. If you want to see examples or case studies of this, you can go to our website and check out the Information Resources page on the Protocols, the published case studies from SAA, and the Sustainable Heritage Network videos.

Well, thanks, Nicole. And thanks to everyone for joining us, uh, this virtual session. We're happy to talk about things. And I'm, um, a person who has written a case study from the perspective of an institution that I no longer work for, but that I derive great inspiration from, which is Northern Arizona University, the very same location where the Protocols were drafted and everyone gathered to, uh, to, to get those Protocols written and disseminated. So, it's a real honor to have worked for them, um, for about eight years. And then, uh, just last year, I transferred over to the University of New Mexico and I'll talk a little bit about some opportunities there. But in this first slide, I just wanted to emphasize some of the areas in which Northern Arizona University really took these Protocols seriously, not just as the institution in which they were drafted, but also, you know, they, they implemented them pretty quickly and adopted and endorsed them pretty much right after they were published.

One of the benefits that we have, and actually, I would say a benefit and or responsibility, is the proximity of Northern Arizona University to a number of Indigenous nations, the least of which were the Hopi and the Navajo, in which we had forged long-term relationships with many years prior. The university has in its institutional goals the goal to serve Indigenous communities and to increase the representation of Indigenous students on its campus. And so that is a strong leveraging point for any institution that's looking to implement or consider ways in which the Protocols can be, um, brought to the leadership of your own institution. It certainly helped in our case where the library had that guidance and that goal that was developed way from up high. We also had, a number of years ago, the creation of the Native American Cultural Center, which really centralized a lot of the programming and efforts that were engaged and targeted towards service to those Indigenous communities. And so it was just a natural segue for us to kind of slide in there and see just where we could fit in and how we can best leverage our library and what we were doing with, um, in, in my particular case, as an archivist in the Special Collections and Archives unit, to really address what some of the, uh, found, so what some of the goals were that were connected to this, um, in the university strategic plan. And if you read the case study or you watch the, the video that is on Sustainable Heritage Network, you can understand a little bit more about how we tied those things together. So, encourage you to check that out.

One of the things that we did was, I wanted to do that survey of our collections. And so you saw that wonderful tool that Nick Whitchuck had had created for institutions to do a cultural audit. We did somewhat of a similar exercise, and we centralized all of our Indigenous resources into a LibGuide, a highly flexible platform in which we could provide very easy descriptions and nest them within topics and subjects of pertinence that would reveal the extent of the collections that we had, not necessarily emphasizing one collection over the other. But what we did do intentionally was we wanted to emphasize and highlight collections that were created, um, either as, uh, the creator that, uh, if the creator was an Indigenous person, for example, that they would be featured and highlighted at the, towards the top of the description of these, these collections, just in order to give that collection and that voice a little bit more prominence. That was one of our intended goals with that.

The other thing that we put into policy and that we executed in a number of different instances was really looking at our collections and letting go of any of that power that we felt like as an institution that we had over them, and really realizing that that the third party in this case, the Indigenous representation, the voices that were in the collections, were had just as equal meaning as the creators who had created them, who were in most cases not Indigenous. So, we realized that there was a lot of power in these collections, and oftentimes we executed our best efforts with appraisal and with deaccessioning. We don't use the word, um, uh, oh gosh, why am I forgetting the, uh, the museum terminology? Thank you, repatriation. That's not a term that we tend to use in archives very often. We tend to fall back on our definitions that we're more comfortable and familiar with. And for administrators who may also feel uncomfortable with the term repatriation, kind of falling back on our own professional standards and ethics really helps soften the conversation and make it a little bit easier for, for kind of folks to get their heads wrapped around the appropriate thing to do. So, we let go of at least one anthropological collection and distributed it to various landowners, and that was the decision that we made in terms of appraisal and the accessioning that made the most sense. So, source communities had had the choice and the options to what they would like for us to do with those materials, which included up to, and including, the actual transfer of the records from our department to their facilities, and we were quite comfortable with doing that. And there are examples of others that we've done that with.

We also have a Memorandum of Understanding with the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office that had been struck well before the Protocols were drafted. So, in many cases, the Protocols were inspired by the MOU and some of the conversations and discussions that we had with respectful representation of the record and to whatever extent should communities be engaged with the process of selection and access and other digitization efforts that we were grappling with at the time. And then finally, we were looking at our overall policies, and we wanted to make sure that our donors and our, our users and anyone else that was going to access our collections could, in hopefully layman's terms, but if they want to see the nitty-gritty detail, they could see our collections management policies and some of our related donor policies that really emphasized this need that we felt was we needed to convey to all of our stakeholders that the collaborations that we have with Indigenous communities were really important, and that that is a consideration for how we acquire collections, how we keep and maintain them, and how we provide access to them responsibly. It's a lot of different things to think about, but we thought that that policy also showed our Indigenous partners that maybe if we hadn't forged relationships with that, they could see that this was something that we were going to take very seriously.

So, um, now, in the next slide, um, as just an additional example, I've only been at this position for just under a year now, but I'm at a health sciences library, and one of the efforts that they are engaged with is the management of the Native Health Database, which is a nationally well-known source for predominantly secondary source information of published articles and newspaper, um, information and pamphlets and other kinds of ephemeral materials, but you know, also inclusive of, uh, good research that's resulted in publications that focus on certain communities, the health and wellness of Indigenous nations. And so, it's a really great resource to search for, in addition to some of the other popular databases for health research like PubMed, for example. This is another excellent resource to look at. But there's been a lot of conversations about the future of this, this platform and how it could be more of a collaborative tool to engage with communities around issues of health and wellness, and what's what's appropriate to share with researchers interested in these, these topics. And so, if you're unfamiliar with Mukurtu, it looks like Mukhertu, but it's Mukurtu. It's a wonderful open-source content management system that's freely downloadable, and its real intent and purpose is providing a technological infrastructure in which these collaborative conversations can take place. And so, we're starting to explore there how we can utilize a tool like this, and maybe even potentially see the addition of content that's more archival, such as oral history or other forms of primary source records that maybe we could harvest metadata from other institutions, or we could look at ways to responsibly create new content, maybe with the, well, yes, with the communities and their involvement and engagement, and then be able to provide access layers that are really nuanced and specific for each community. So, we think that there could be a really meaningful project and endeavor into the future with this, and these conversations are ongoing. But I think one of the takeaways is that we may move to different institutions periodically, but the core ethos that we have within us to want to enact change and do the right thing really permeates to these new institutions. And so, um, a large amount of what we do are to go to these institutions and to say, "Hey, this is what we've done at our other institution. How can we, how can we implement something like this here? Here's some demonstrated benefits to why we're doing this or why we've done this." So, I think there's opportunities for all of us, even if we, uh, shift around every once in a while, to, um, to do the right thing. And I'm excited about the opportunities that I have. I very much miss my colleagues, my wonderful, wonderful colleagues at Northern Arizona University, but I am as equally excited about the opportunities that I'm presented with at, uh, University of New Mexico. So, I just wanted to talk a little bit about, uh, those two institutions and how this, um, fundamental concept of the Protocols can be executed. Just some examples, and hopefully that was helpful.

Absolutely. Thank you, Jonathan. Now, we're going to move on to the second chapter in the Protocols, and I'm going to turn the virtual microphone over to Dr. Diana Marsh to introduce this to us.

Um, thank you. This is the quote that opens this section of the Protocols, and what's really nice about it is that it captures the fact that in doing this kind of work, to ethically steward and provide access to Native American and Indigenous archival materials that we're also committed to, we're trying to bring together two very different ways of knowing, expectations, assumptions, practices, and perspectives: those of communities and those of often very old, non-tribal, colonially rooted institutions and the professionals that work there and archival practices.

Slide. Some key themes in this section are: The collecting institutions for the last 200-plus years have privileged Western, Eurocentric approaches to stewardship and archival custodianship that include the idea that knowledge can and should be open to all. And second, that that includes an approach to ownership and copyright that doesn't align with community models of knowledge ownership that might be restricted, say, by gender or time of year. Many other aspects were collectively owned, and there are many other ways that these two worldviews differ. And a fundamental premise of the Protocols is that they might differ, but they're not irreconcilable, and that we can, in fact, bridge those two.

So, um, some action items for this section include examining established, taken-for-granted principles and practices and looking critically at where they contradict Native and community-based ones; developing, in consultation or collaboration, new approaches that meld both worldviews and practices and approaches; and proactively acquiring or building collections that are created by rather than about Native peoples. Jonathan just mentioned collections, say, you know, by historical anthropologists. And I think collecting from Native knowledge keepers today helps to build new, enriched collections.

So, I'm coming at this topic having spent the last five years working in very large, um, and old institutions. The first, uh, for two years, like Jonathan, I'm formerly of the institution I'm going to be talking about today. I was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow for two years at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, and then for the last three years, I've been at the National Anthropological Archives at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. And I'm going to share a little bit about the APS. This is a shorthand for the American Philosophical Society, because led by Brian Carpenter, their curator of Native American materials, there, both our first case study and the second webinar as part of our efforts featured the APS, and I know their efforts pretty well having been there. For some brief context, for those who haven't heard of the APS, I frankly hadn't before I saw the fellowship call I applied for. They were founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin, um, and, uh, friends, and, um, were the first scientific society, um, in America. Um, it's still active today. It has about 900 members that meet regularly, and, um, through the years, those members acquired, um, papers and documents associated with their work, and that became the core of the collection of the library, which now has these huge collections of archival and rare book materials and other media. And because many of these early members were some of the first interested in Indigenous language collecting in the early American colonies and then the fledgling United States, the APS has this very large and very early collection of Indigenous language materials, as well as lots of other associated Indigenous and Native American materials.

So, basically, the APS is a great example of a truly old-school place that started project by project doing things differently. So, in 2007, they got a Getty grant to survey photos and artwork. Then they had two-plus Mellon grants to digitize audio collections and involve Native partners in consultation and collaboration. And by 2010, they formed a Native American Advisory Board, and they'd held a major conference that brought together both Native and non-Native scholars and archivists. And between 2011 and 2014, they created their own Protocols for Native American Materials that meld the needs, the specific needs of the society with those laid out in the P-NAM. And those are really great to look at because it's a true institutional perspective on how to adopt and sort of finesse these principles into something that works for an institution. And by 2014, just before I arrived there in 2015, they created a formal Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (C-NAIR), which also committed the APS to forming an endowment to make sure that that center and this Indigenous community-facing work would become a permanent part of the library.

So, when I arrived, they had already built so many meaningful relationships, and I was tasked with co-curating the first exhibit featuring Indigenous archival materials that they'd done at the APS Museum, um, focused on Thomas Jefferson's early language collecting, um, to today. And, um, as part of that exhibition, we created this interactive map, which I show here, just to, to say that in not very long, with only a couple of people working at the center, they did a ton of community-faced outreach and digital sharing and partnership building. This is just an interactive map that shows many of the different places where they were creating those partnerships. As of late 2018, C-NAIR had ongoing collaborative projects with more than 30 Indigenous communities, ongoing contact and work with about 70, and had sent digitized materials to over 200 different Indigenous communities. And as part of that work, they reviewed and restricted materials, and they've done a really pretty comprehensive job of that. And there's a lot of fear that changing our practices, and especially that restricting collections at our institutions, will somehow damper research. And I think the webinar, which you should definitely watch, and the case study really lay out the fact that that's not the case at all. This new community-focused approach has really amazing mutual benefits: not only better and more ethical access for communities, but better information about collections, um, very positive experiences for researchers who may not have known that collections needed to be restricted or that they should have been in touch with a tribal community, and they want to build those relationships and do ethical research. And then, as you can see from this lovely graph, just increased research interest and use across the board from both Native and non-Native scholars. So, it actually has been a really positive and kind of energy-building project for the society.

Um, and so I want to end by just saying that, um, you know, this is a place that, uh, is a truly colonial, in the early American essence of the term, institution. And starting with a few grant projects and building and building, um, they've now created a kind of comprehensive approach to community-facing work that speaks to the ability to bridge these two worlds of old institutions and communities that I think can be replicated elsewhere. And if any of you know, uh, knowledge keeper and, um, senior project coordinator at the Deo Hojage Indigenous Knowledge Center at Six Nations Polytechnic, Rick Hill, he had gifted this belt to the APS. We featured it in our exhibit, and I think this belt is a wonderful way that he talks about, um, that relationship, that, you know, this helps to symbolize or enact or remind us that working between Indigenous and non-Indigenous partners and building relationships of trust and cooperation is possible, and we can establish these relationships and create healthy and mutually beneficial partnerships, and to always think about that connection between us and to clear the way for those relationships as we go forward. So, I highly recommend the case study and the webinar with Jennifer O'Neill, and to look at some of the work the APS is doing as a possible model at your institution.

Awesome. Thank you, Diana. Um, we're now going to turn, um, everything over to Stephen Curley, our immediate past chair and steering committee member, and, uh, sorry, my finger slipped a little bit on that slide, um, to discuss, uh, the Protocols Chapter 5 and providing context and our latest webinar example.

Stephen: Yeah, thank you, Caitlin, and thank you all. I want to say first and foremost, uh, to the steering committee for continuing this dialogue regarding the discourse around the Protocols and how things are implemented and adapted. Uh, we're certainly in remarkable times, and I want to also thank SAA for, uh, continuing and with full speed ahead and making these, uh, sessions available to, uh, all the membership and SAA. So, uh, thank you again, Diana, for, um, for making that, uh, nice segue, uh, regarding partnership. There's a lot to gain from that section that you just completed. The last thing I honed in on was again this idea of relationship building for the intention of partnership creation. So, one, one thing that can go very far with those types of activities is understanding and having a devout appreciation for context. And so, in the Protocols, context is touched upon in Chapter 5 of this living document. So, I'm actually just going to read what the document says about context.

"A primary task for libraries and archives is to organize and describe information resources for efficient and effective retrieval. Collecting institutions also wish to share as much context as possible to enhance the value of resources for patrons. However, the use of outdated, inaccurate, derogatory, or Eurocentric language impedes access. Descriptive information can be improved with the addition of culturally appropriate and accurate language. These original titles through finding aids, Native American communities should be aware that offensive language or other injurious perspectives and information may be inherent in the content of some of the original materials."

And so, there's three main, uh, concepts, uh, that are sort of highlighted, um, emboldened in that paragraph, and one I want to impress upon you. So, the first one is, "enhance the value of resources for patrons." So, as a statement alone, this is pretty axiomatic. It's a sort of self-evident, uh, to us as archivists. But what's important is that we need to take proactive steps towards adding more context to our collections that we manage as they relate to relevant source communities. And in this context, we're talking about tribal communities. Doing so enhances its use and authority as a resource for these archival materials.

The second bullet there is, "descriptive information can be improved." So, yes, we most definitely can improve, uh, the original, embed legacy information. I want to extend this, sort of, as a normative statement to say that it should be improved, as long as we are organized as archivists and, you know, we do it in a deliberate fashion about how we, uh, improve, uh, these, these types of descriptions. Uh, we also need to make those original interpretations available, make those original metadata descriptions available, but also couple them with the augmented information as well.

The third bullet there is, "culturally appropriate and accurate language." So, similar to the above bullet, this involves the desire to improve the descriptive information, but it also qualifies it with tenets of respect and also in holding our institutions that we're representing, uh, to a higher standard in, sort of, all sense of the word. So, the last thing that sort of is involved with these three, um, I guess themes, is all these are tied to this notion of holistic curation, which in my mind, sort of describes a feedback mechanism between source institutions, stakeholders, uh, which can include, uh, archivists, curators, collection managers, and source communities. Those source communities can consist of tribal governments, communities, and groups, and that will inform how these collections are presented, interpreted, and prioritized in the project workload. Cultivating now this holistic curation will only make the collections better. Uh, so that's, uh, sort of this feedback loop that we're wanting to make sure that, uh, is, is, sort of created.

So, if we can go to the next slide, please.

Okay, so, "statement of fact is context matters." The operative word here is, of course, context. So, think about that. What does context mean? Context comes into play in a variety of settings. I'm sure everyone here has been in dire straits when something is said or acted or committed, you know, and that thing is lost in translation. So, you might be wondering why my hair looks as though it came out of a, uh, '70s Native Soul Train episode. The context behind that is the barber shops are closed right now. So, context definitely matters.

So, I wanted to define context, just so that, you know, we're working with a definition that's, uh, sort of shared. So, "the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed." So, um, context matters in a very philosophical way, and, and sort of relates to how we communicate with one another, ideas of our own ideas communicated to us by a third party, information communicated to us by way of primary sources, information that we communicate to others by way of primary sources, and so on and so forth. So, it's a very much, uh, a meta sort of phenomena, and, uh, metadata is a centerpiece to that discussion, and, uh, we all know what metadata is, so I won't belabor that point.

I wanted to take it back to, uh, the land acknowledgment, because this, in and of itself, is a contextual piece and, uh, kind of lends itself pretty nicely to discussions, uh, as it relates to the archives context. So, if we bring back to, uh, land acknowledgment, what does it do? When, when I say that I'm coming to you from the Twin Cities area of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, which is located on traditional, ancestral, and contemporary lands of many tribal nations, mostly because these were Dakota ceded lands in the treaties of 1837 and 1851. And moreover, the state of Minnesota is home to about 60,000 American Indians who represent tribal nations found throughout the United States. So, what does that do? What does making that statement do? Uh, there is a context there which alludes to the fact that tribal nations possess, um, an inherent sovereignty and also governance. Coupled with that, in addition to this statement of fact, doing so, if doing so, uh, if your institution has an acknowledgment statement, it's a statement of solidarity intended to pronounce your institution's positioning in terms of whether or not your institution thinks of itself as an ally. It's also intended to convey that your institution has values of accountability. And, you know, context matters. So, I won't belabor that point any further.

But in the context of archives, because this is kind of why we're here, we're here to discuss the Protocols, I think of the keywords: tribal sovereignty, governance, allyship, accountability. Those can, those can be transposed to an archival context because intrinsically, like I said before, and, uh, be laboring the point, context matters to archivists. As archivists, we inherently know this to be true. We monitor and track things like custodial history and provenance, and even if funds are respected, and we should respect those funds. Let's let's expand those notions that I just listed outward to tribal collections. So, when you consider the colonial perspectives that are inherited and associated with the majority of archival materials, and how and what context they were generated from, or even postcolonial materials and how those were generated, we know that history is very complicated, and users, depending on their level of expertise, may find this very difficult to navigate. So, it becomes very much incumbent upon us as archivists to, uh, or or stewards, rather, of history, to be able to re-contextualize and to assist users in this process of navigation. So, uh, being created from a certain lens, a certain point of view, and, uh, from a certain context, we know that further interpretations are especially important.

So, uh, actually, next slide, please.

So, just like in the Tribe Sourcing Southwest Film Project, there's a lot of context, uh, in terms of, uh, mechanisms that are built into the project. So, assuming your institution is very cognizant of this context, you're able to do very interesting things, just like with the Tribe Sourcing Southwest Film Project. So, in episode 3 of the NAS sponsored webinars, it featured Jennifer Jenkins, who's the principal investigator and project director of that project; Melissa Doleman, who's also a project manager; Rain Sorrel and Crystal Littleben, who were sort of acting in, uh, tribal consultant capacities for the, uh, tribal, uh, Navajo videos that are featured in the webinar. So, this project is an offshoot of what's called the American Indian Film Gallery at the University of Arizona and features about 500 videos that were originally educational videos. The U of A knew they wanted to go the extra mile and not just preserving these films and making them available, but to also make these sort of a centerpiece in the programmatic direction of curating ethnographic material. So, um, the, and I, I strongly encourage you to look at this webinar, it's very interesting. So, the overall, um, sort of premise of this project is to involve Native peoples of the Southwest and the narration of these historic films to enhance, recontextualize, and reinterpret those original narratives that are often inaccurate and often uninformed. So, it's kind of a way again to re-contextualize what's being espoused as true and authentic. So, uh, Jennifer Jenkins and her team worked with Native American tribes and individuals to enhance those narratives. So, one of the films that were featured in the webinar was called "The Navajo Silversmith" from 1959. So, again, I encourage you to watch that webinar and to also, um, play it back with some of the recontextualized narration pieces by, uh, some of the, the, the professionals. It kind of reads like an overdubbing narration. So, it's very interesting.

If we can go to the next slide, please.

Yeah, so I wanted to, um, hone in, uh, on some of the themes that was associated with the webinar to provide further context, since this is the operative word that we're working with. So, "Ways of Knowing." Diana actually mentioned that just a little bit, so I won't belabor that point, but it essentially relates to epistemologies and how different worldviews construct teaching and learning, knowledge structures. And it's worth it to know that oral histories and oral traditions and the spoken word are very integral to, uh, Native ways of knowing, and that in the context of this discussion, uh, that needs to be taken into account, regarding the ways that we as archivists capture, select, organize, and perpetuate these types of information and data sets. It stands to reason that oral history itself is an untapped potential in the development of historiographies.

So, the next bullet there is, "Authority." So, context also involves perspective. As we've already established, the need to adjust our perspective as a professional who's following these newly endorsed standards to fulfill and understand and acknowledge where the gaps are, not only in our professional repertoire but also with regard to those cultural competencies that we might have and things that we might want to cultivate within ourselves professionally. Varying perspectives will happen, of course, which is fine. It's kind of the nature of, uh, living in a pluralistic society. As information professionals, that is something that should be our specialty. Also, the management of diverging and converging points of view that represent a diverse worldview, even within a selected topic or subject, is also associated with things like data management and collections management and things like that.

So, the third bullet, "Salvage Anthropology." So, this was an early practice. This was, for all intents and purposes, a movement perpetuated in the early 20th century to early 20th century. And this was also a way of knowing. It was a type of an old Western paternalistic way of knowing, but a way of knowing nonetheless. And these pictures that I have on the right are pictures of the Edward Curtis body of work regarding the large-scale portraiture project. He mobilized in the early 1900s, 1906, I believe, and 1907. So, a really quick turnaround, called "The North American Indian." The idea behind salvage anthropology, for further context, of course, is that ethnologists and historians wanted to essentially preserve and document cultural elements of the American Indian, since to white professionals and scholars and legislators at the time, it was, it was inevitable for Native communities to vanish and disappear, right, by the ravages of things like assimilation, displacement, disease, and other similar consequences of colonization. So, again, that's a believer of the point. But the last thing that I want to impress upon you with salvage anthropology is that these portraits were not rife, not only rife with intentional shortcomings, but they were also riddled with inaccuracies because a lot of the time these photographs were staged. And, uh, and these two images here, there's a clock's missing on the top one. The bottom one is actually the original. So, there's a bit of a narrative about romanticism going on and having and keeping Native people sort of in a certain context of living in the past, and that sort of thing replicates itself.

So, "Cultural Competency." Next bullet point is, we need to understand the context of the source community, of course, and cultivate our own cultural competencies, not only to the tribal communities but to all communities that are sort of in proximity to our source, to our organizations or institutions, um, and, uh, to, to really identify this as sort of a skill, because it is a skill. And this is more important to understand given some of the other associated calls to action, like with the BLM, the Black Lives Matter movement, and what that means to work towards those goals as an archivist. That deeply involves the purposeful outreach and listening to these communities, situationally, but also historically, and to be cognizant of those contexts to be able to do something meaningful to rectify some of those shortcomings within our own institution or within our own profession. Also, the last, second to last bullet point there is, "Reclamation." So, I won't talk too much about that, but for non-tribal institutions, it's very much worthwhile to enter into conversations with source communities to be able to contextualize this information. So, the question there, it's kind of a rhetorical device: "Can you, how can you bolster your institutional capacity for context?" That's just kind of the, almost like a million-dollar word. It's a pragmatic word. And the practical question that people need to be asking now, because now is the best time to be able to to do that.

Next slide, please.

So, we have two, uh, two main bullets there: "Cultivating a mechanism of holistic curation and community-contributed metadata." How, how can you conduct and fulfill these things of context? So, we want to try to create a micro community of practice that is institutionally specific to your context. And Diana mentioned the APS and their efforts with their own set of protocols, which is something that is a precedent and something that's a very good example of how they're adapting and adopting the Protocols to fit their needs within their own context. We also want to create a shorthand by a shorthand between stakeholders and expanding on notions of collaboration, inclusivity, partnership, and trust. The third thing there is, we want to be mindful that we're creating institutional knowledge that can be transmitted throughout your institution and transcend contexts within your institution.

The second main tenet there is, "Community-Contributed Metadata." And we want to source and centralize community-contributed descriptions, and we want to do it in a way that we're not invasive or we're not intrusive. So, don't approach it as as data mining. We don't want to do that. We don't want to replicate unfortunate practices of, you know, things like salvage anthropology.

Next slide, please.

So, I just have some, uh, some quick questions, uh, right here, and you can sort of think about these at your own speed, but I'm gonna just lay these out before I sign off. So, the first question is, "What is our current project workload, and can we work towards a project development initiative to bolster context of Native American collections?" So, this involves not only thinking critically about your collections, but thinking intentionally about your collections as well. So, with that example and Tribe Sourcing, "The Navajo Silversmith," one thing that stood out to me from that dub-over commentary was that if you watch the film, the commentator mentioned that it has very little to do with Navajo silversmithing. I thought that was pretty interesting.

The next question there is, "How do we bolster? What will that look like?" So, think creatively and outside the box. Look at the tools that are available. There were already a few mentioned in this webinar. There's, uh, Mukurtu, of course. There's other things that, uh, I don't believe received attention in the webinar with Jennifer, was, uh, the Traditional Knowledge Labels. And so, just real quick, the Traditional Knowledge Labels are created by the Local Contexts organization, and they're essentially, if you want to think of them as as tagging systems or labels that we can assign to our collections to further contextualize how we should be utilizing, how the user should be utilizing the collections.

The third question here is, "What do relevant tribal communities want?" That's purposeful outreach. What do other relevant stakeholders want, excluding the admin? How can your network do the legwork? So, what I meant by that question is, are there current, you know, if you're at a university, are there current Native American Studies programs that can sort of facilitate these types of discussions? And just kind of think creatively, getting back to that creative notion, do we have the capacity and time to onboard somebody? Last question there is, "If not, how do we build capacity?" Maybe you want to start thinking about grant writing or redirecting efforts within your project workload, and, you know, seeking tribal assistance to be able to pull off those projects. Yep. Thank you very much.

Awesome. Thank you, Stephen. Um, I think there are really great questions, um, in general, beyond just, uh, the Protocols Chapter 5, and these are questions that I think we should all be thinking about. And you can even apply this out further, not just how do we bolster our tribal context, but how do we bolster historical context and the context of the collections within our repositories of marginalized communities? I think that's something that's really important, and that I'm glad, and I know we are all glad, SAA is having more discussions about, especially during this conference. And just quickly, to wrap things up, so, as we mentioned before, everything that we talked about in this session relates to ongoing work that we're doing as the Native American Archives Section to continue to create and share webinars and resources for non-Native institutions, um, who are working with Native American archival materials and hoping to collaborate with tribal communities represented in their collections. And we've included links throughout the presentation and here on this slide where you can find additional information for all of these webinars, links to these webinars, and additional resources. As we move forward, we'll also be creating more resources, so please, uh, stay, keep an eye out on our site and our social media channels. Um, you can also email us anytime or reach out to us through our social media listed on this slide, with any additional questions. And we are hoping to have a follow-up Q&A, so stay tuned for that later on in this conference. And as you'll see in the SAA conference schedule, we will also be joining the Human Rights Archives Section on Tuesday, August 11th, for a joint section meeting where we will be discussing our experiences planning and leading collaborative webinar projects, as well as the rights of sovereign Native American nations to traditional knowledge and information as a human right. And so, we hope that you will join us for that, and if not, it will be recorded. So, thank you again for joining us today. Thank you so much, um, to the tech team that helped put this on, and thank you to everyone at SAA for helping to facilitate these sessions. And we hope you all are staying safe and healthy, and we hope you'll reach out with further questions and ideas. Thanks.