Kimberly Ann Christen

This chapter examines the return, reuse, and repositioning of archival materials within Indigenous communities and specifically within the Warumungu Aboriginal community in Central Australia. Over the last 20 years there has been an uptake in collecting institutions and scholars returning cultural, linguistic, and historical material to Indigenous communities in digital formats. These practices of digital return have been spurred by decolonisation and reconciliation movements globally, and at the same time catalysed by new technologies that allow for surrogates to be returned and concurrently reinvented, reused, and reimagined in community, kin-based, and place-based social and cultural networks. Examining the creation, use, and ongoing development of Mukurtu CMS, this article focuses on the implications for digital return as a type of repatriation that promotes decolonising strategies and reparative frameworks for engagement.

Although physical archives were never intended to be input, they are often defined as places where one deposits materials. Over the last 10 years, however, with digital tools and platforms that rely on user-generated content growing in popularity, curation has been linked to an outward-facing public view. In digital humanities and media studies, using archival content or generating one’s own archive has become prevalent. Remixing content from online sources and mining archives for data are seen as beneficial forms of digital knowledge creation. What is marginalized in these practices are the histories of archival content creation, diverse ethical systems of knowledge management, and cultural values that highlight differential access to material. Examining Indigenous systems of knowledge sheds light on alternative forms of archival practices and opens another avenue for collaboration and digital production.
The etymological roots of the term archive highlight the relationship between archives, state institutions, and public policies. The origins of modern archives are intimately linked to colonial logics of vanishing races, imperial projects of collection, and colonial nation-making strategies. Archives have always been home to humanists; they are places where voices are recovered from long quiet pages. Marginal notes inspire new historical insights, and government documents unearth untold national trajectories. Digital technologies have made new types of access and modes of curation possible and provide one avenue for examining archival openness, access policies, and how values are embedded in archival acts. Indigenous cultural production in archiving and curation provides a counterbalance to these workflows and gives us different models for sharing, arranging, and circulating knowledge. In Australia, Aboriginal practices of masking, deleting, and hiding images, objects, and artifacts are quite common.