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December 6, 2018Preliminary Considerations
First off, what is an archive?
I have thought a lot about archives throughout the last year, but mostly in the context of the family archive. How I see it, a collection of photographs and videos made by the nucleus of the family accumulate together to construct a deep aspect of the familial memory. I think of it as a radiating and shifting orb that is infrequently considered and seen, but ever-present and glowing in the collective unconscious of all its members.
This excited me. I felt like the family archive was a living entity. Especially in relation to my consideration of a “formal” archive. The latter felt stagnant and dead. There was something untouchable about, say, a national archive, which seemed to be less present than a collective memory; it seemed to be too bureaucratic to be alive.
Now, my mind has shifted. The deadness that I had attributed to institutional archives came to be from the feeling that they were impenetrable and fixed. In many cases, I think that institutional archives are still impenetrable and fixed, but they do not have to be. The structures that determine what goes into an archive, how the archive material is stored and catalogued, and who can access it are created by people and can be changed by people. If fact, these determining structures must not be treated passively as permanent entities or they will exclude people and erase their histories and their memories.
This exclusion and erasure is of course nothing new. As Rodney G.S. Carter says, as “spaces of power, the archive is riddled with silences” (233). Upon these recent considerations, I have landed on the thought that the archive is grounds for constant battle: what’s in an archive, how it’s handled, and who has access to it is imperative to the present and future of all peoples; social structures and power relationships are ever-changing; thus, archives need to be constantly considered and actively negotiated.
This brings me to my semester project, my archive to be considered. As I opened my folder, I could quickly see a theme: residential schools and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s counteractions to the Canadian government’s handling of the residential school narrative. Heavy. But necessary, for myself and for our country.
Flipping through the images, I landed on a few articles. This statement from Image 5 stood out immediately: “We must never forget because we have to use history to remind ourselves how to be better in the future.” And then I could see an interesting counter to this narrative. In another article, there was a declared push-back from some who had lived the residential school horror and did not want to live it again. They wanted to tear down the remaining structures and remaining pieces of the history; it was so terrible that they thought it should never be lived again. Why memorialize a violent and tragic history? Still, that statement above rings strong, “we have to use history to remind ourselves how to be better in the future.”
But this does raise an interesting point. Again, Carter points out that archivists “must recognize that not everyone wishes to be represented by their institutions” (233). Silence is a powerful tool within the discourse of the archive. But this brings me back to my previous consideration: archives need to be constantly considered and actively negotiated. They are battle grounds for the past, the present, and the future. Thus, the structures that affect them cannot be taken for granted; rather, they must be constantly critiqued and reimagined.
Postscript: this blog is an archive of my thoughts that have surfaced around the making of Redacted. It is fragmented into six parts–connected, yet disparate. The time stamps are definitive, yet inaccurate. And collectively it may amount to something larger than its parts, to a memory that becomes crystallized into a narrative of the past that may influence how I see myself and the world in the future.
0002 Conceptual and Practical Issues with the Archive
0004 The Indian Act and the Filing Cabinet