Cultural Event 4: Indigenous Community Archiving and Collective Memory

I attended a UMBC-hosted panel online earlier this evening. The first panelist, Ashley Minner (Lumbee), former UMBC Professor and now assistant curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, discussed her motivation to make archival materials she found about Baltimore Lumbee history available to other members of the Lumbee community. The new Ashley Minner Collection at UMBC (discussed further here) was founded to do just that; the second panelist, archivist Tiffany Chavis, did a lot of work to set up plans, a finding aid, etc., for that collection. Jessica Locklear (Lumbee), inspired by Minner, has begun to do similar work in Philadephia. One of the audio recordings she played during tonight's panel consisted of reminiscences of the American Indian Center there, which closed in 2004. Of particular interest to me was that it was often a site for activism, among many other uses.

Finally, Siobhan C. Hagan discussed how she helps communities preserve audio/visual records; the local records digitized through the organization she founded are freely available at her company's website. She also encouraged attendees to protect their own family recordings; for instance, Memory Labs in public libraries enable digitization of otherwise short-lived home videos at low or no cost. She also encouraged folks to consider sharing those home videos, pointing out that the only results she could find for the search term "Native Americans" in this public archive of home movies were filmed by White people. Some of those films, she reported, even show nothing more than White folks attempting to appropriate Native culture.

A Community Digitization Day is planned in future; potential volunteers can sign up and get on a mailing list to receive more information about the Ashley Minner Collection through this link.

[image from an article about Minner's new position at NMAI)