Postcolonial Digital Connections - Proceedings
 

Kate Hennessy and Hannah Turner

(Simon Fraser University, Canada (KH) and University of Leicester, UK (HT))

Networked Heritage and Collaborative Practices: Case Studies from British Columbia

Introduction video from the project, Digital Sq’éwlets: A Stó:lō-Coast Salish Community in the Fraser River Valley. www.digitalsqewlets.ca

Our presentation to the Postocolonial Digital Collections Symposium discussed how over the last twenty years, a number of web-based collections portals and related digital exhibition projects have emerged out of collaborative relationships between museums and originating communities. These efforts come out of and are driving shifts in institutional practices, challenging how institutions and individuals have (or have not) contended with settler-imposed ideas of rationality, objectivity, and property. Many of these collaborative web-based projects are useful tools for research on museum collections, but often they are static web pages that do not meet expectation for participation from users. In our work, we have been questioning how digital tools can represent perspectives in transformative modes, and how belongings held in museum collections can be activated for use in a postcolonial and digital age. The work that we present here engages with how digital technologies have been used to reframe and improve access to material culture and data in collaboration with First Nations Indigenous communities, primarily in British Columbia, Canada. We highlight three examples that we have been involved as collaborators in developing: Turner was a researcher and developer of the Reciprocal Research Network at the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at the University of British Columbia (UBC), and Hennessy was a designer and co-producer of the Inuvialuit Living History Project (2012), and Sq’éwlets: A Stó:lō-Coast Salish community in the Fraser River Valley (2017), which we will elaborate on below.

First, we want to highlight the specific localised issues when working in British Columbia with collections where the communities of origin have political and economic challenges due to settler colonialism. We feel that this is important in the context of an international conversation but also because the development of these kinds of digitized cultural-heritage projects are never separate from the political climates of specific local and national governments. Many of these claims are really about how we can use the historical collections or the information and knowledge we gain from academic research in conjunction with supporting Indigenous peoples’ claims to property, cultural protocols and intellectual rights to ensure and work to repair historical harm – but also to create a more well-rounded understanding of the past. We both come from British Columbia, and have lived and worked on the traditional unceded territories of the Stó:lō Nation, the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. But there are many other groups and language groups in the Northwest Coast and Western Canada; and it is important to understand that elsewhere in Canada there were many different kinds of relationships made between Settlers and Indigenous people.[ 1 ] In large parts of British Columbia, the lands are unceded, (title of land was never ‘negotiated’) and many communities are working to regain traditional and economic land rights.

Early European contact in British Columbia also saw the spread of materials to hundreds of museums outside of Canada throughout the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. As is the story with many historical museum collections, much research has been done to understand how communities can get back the belongings that were taken under duress or without consent, and ask how they can better access the collections that are stored in museums around the world. Since the 1990s this has been approached using digital tools – essentially remote web based access. This is also now part of a larger process of what the state (Canada) has called “Reconciliation”; which was formally investigated as part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).[ 2 ] The TRC was established in 2008 and published its report and Calls to Action in 2015. It was a federal inquiry into the horrific reality of Residential Schools that were run in Canada since the 19th century, and the last of which closed in 1996. The TRC’s final report also made recommendations for institutions – challenges to raise for archives and museums and other heritage institutions to work towards more equitable and shared access to historic materials. Despite this, ‘reconciliation’ has many challenges, as governments continue to exploit the land for resources and ignore Indigenous government systems. Trying to understand if it is possible to decolonize is very difficult, but an important task at hand.

Screenshot of an object materials search for ‘Cedar’ on the Reciprocal Research Network. www.rrncommunity.org

The first project highlighted above was created out of a desire to increase or improve access to museum collections that held Northwest Coast belongings. The Reciprocal Research Network was developed collaboratively with the Museum of Anthropology and the University of British Columbia and three co-developing institutions: the Stó:lō Nation/Tribal Council, The Musqueam Indian Band, and the U’Mista Cultural Society. It is a web-based search tool that allows users to see all of the items from a particular community or location all in one ‘digital’ place - without having to search across multiple museum platforms. At the time this was conceived, internet searching was a new tool, and the ability to speak back to institutions and respect contributor knowledge was paramount.[ 3 ]

Screenshot from the homepage of the Inuvialuit Pitqusiit Inuuniarutait/Inuvialuit Living History Project. www.inuvialuitlivinghistory.ca

The Inuvialuit Living History project brought Inuvialuit elders, cultural workers, youth, and media producers to Washington DC to engage with the Smithsonian’s Inuvialuit MacFarlane Collection, and later to use the Reciprocal Research Network’s Application Programming Interface (API) to remediate the collection from an Inuvialuit perspective. Working on cataloguing and classifying objects from an alternative perspective allowed for certain belongings to be seen together in new ways, and a particular focus was paid to the relationship between belongings and land.[ 4 ]

Screenshot of the Belongings displayed online from the project, Digital Sq’éwlets: A Stó:lō-Coast Salish Community in the Fraser River Valley. www.digitalsqewlets.ca

The most recent project, Sq’éwlets: A Stó:lō-Coast Salish community in the Fraser River Valley, is a community biography reflecting on 20 years of collaborative archaeology on Stó:lō land in the Fraser River Valley in British Columbia. Building on (now outdated) ideas that unmediated access is ‘enough’, other projects have sought to re-frame historical collections through use of digital surrogates, like the Inuvialuit Living History Project. Like the Inuvialuit Living History Project, the Sq’éwlets online exhibit also used the RRN to digitally unite dispersed collections and curate a representative selection of belongings to feature. This web-based media project and learning resource required a deep commitment to reengaging with the form of archaeology itself and to ultimately shift categories once used to describe objects, including categories for ownership and circulation of the digital.[ 5 ]

These distinct, yet interrelated projects from Canada’s Northwest coast and Arctic regions seek to unsettle narratives about the past in different ways by providing access to previously inaccessible collections and individuals in institutions (RRN), by deepening the connection between belongings, history, and land, and by re-naming and re-classifying belongings according to Indigenous understandings (Digital Sq’ewlets and The Inuvialuit Living History Project). The potential for engagement with seemingly unmediated affordances that new technologies bring to the study of history and material culture has launched fields of study, research projects, large-scale open-access databases and more. We have found that what we consider to be typically Western or scientific ideas about belongings as objects and evidence of the past can coexist with understandings and orderings of Indigenous communities, whose ancestors used and owned these belongings. But we must start renegotiating power structures and historical categories to do accomplish this.

 
[ 1 ]
For an evolving, interactive map of the many different language groups, treaties and territories, please see the resource www.native-land.ca and the extensive Tribal Nations Map www.tribalnationsmaps.com. For more on the timeline of settlement of BC from the 1700s, see the Union of BC Indian Chiefs website www.ubcic.bc.ca/timeline
[ 2 ]
Truth and Reconciliation Canada. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Winnipeg: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015.
[ 3 ]
For more on the Reciprocal Research Network, see: Susan Rowley, “The Reciprocal Research Network: The Development Process”, Museum Anthropology Review 7, no. 1–2 (2013): 22–43.
[ 4 ]
For more in the Inuvialuit Living History Project, see: Kate Hennessy et al., “The Inuvialuit Living History Project: Digital Return as the Forging of Relationships Between Institutions, People, and Data,” Museum Anthropology Review 7, no. 1–2 (2013): 44–73.
[ 5 ]
For more the Digital Sq’éwlets Project see: Natasha Lyons et al., “Sharing Deep History as Digital Knowledge: An Ontology of the Sq’éwlets Website Project”, Journal of Social Archaeology 16, no. 3 (2016): 359–384.
back