Kimberly Ann Christen

Indigenous peoples in Australia have been heavily documented in colonial archives and collections. The past two decades have seen significant materials from Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) institutions being returned to Indigenous communities in Australia through physical or digital repatriation of materials. The digital return of materials requires both appropriate systems for returning both the digital collections, metadata and contextual information that relates to them, and agreements, policies, and procedures for meaningfully engaging with Indigenous communities throughout the process. Importantly, the information returned needs to be accessible, readable, and usable in local community contexts based on understanding local community needs. This paper discusses priorities around engaging with Indigenous peoples to reshape and build archival information systems and access points that support community requirements for digital return and management of cultural heritage materials in local settings. The paper discusses future priorities for designing archival information systems to support Indigenous sovereignty, including data stewardship and preservation approaches. These concerns are discussed and raised as part of the research and development of the global Mukurtu Content Management System (CMS) project, including within the New South Wales (NSW) Australian Mukurtu Hub.

This article examines the structures, practices, and processes of collection, cataloging, and curation to expose where current cultural authority is placed, valued, and organized within archival workflows. The long arc of collecting is not just rooted in colonial paradigms; it relies on and continually remakes those structures of injustice through the seemingly benign practices and processes of the profession. Our emphasis is on one mode of decolonizing processes that insist on a different temporal framework: the slow archives. Slowing down creates a necessary space for emphasizing how knowledge is produced, circulated, and exchanged through a series of relationships. Slowing down is about focusing differently, listening carefully, and acting ethically. It opens the possibility of seeing the intricate web of relationships formed and forged through attention to collaborative curation processes that do not default to normative structures of attribution, access, or scale.

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.

In this article we provide a structural critique of attribution as it is figured in colonial practices and ongoing settler-colonial logics that form the basis for creating, circulating, and sharing knowledge through research practices, methods, and platforms. Settler colonialism is a tradition, and as such, it has habits. One of these habits is to hide specific tactics and practices in operationalizing dispossession. Attribution is one of these tactics. Attribution functions as a key mechanism within a copyright/author/archive matrix which maintains hierarchies of knowledge production by reducing Indigenous and non-European subjectivity and legitimating the ongoing appropriation of Indigenous 1 cultural material by non-Indigenous authors. The colonial force of attribution and its practices of exclusion are hidden in the stacks and how they are populated; in the rights fields of databases and how they are cited; in archival processes of selection, appraisal, and accessioning; and through efforts to digitize content and collections in order to make them open without acknowledgment and ongoing relationships. We argue that one mode of decolonizing practices for libraries and archives is through remaking, reframing, and refiguring attribution through ongoing Indigenous connections to land and knowledge.

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.

This paper describes the history of Mukurtu CMS and our current project "Mukurtu Hubs and Spokes: A Sustainable National Platform for Community Archiving" funded by the IMLS as part of their National Digital Platform initiative in 2016. This project is an extension of the social, cultural, and technical work of developing the Mukurtu CMS software to the current 2.0.7 release. Mukurtu CMS is community driven software that addresses the ethical curation of, and access to, cultural heritage. The Mukurtu Hubs and Spokes grant will create regional centers of support and training and update the software to a 3.0 release. Each Mukurtu hub will contribute to the software updates and provide local training and support for community users.

Sovereignty is an often invoked, yet notoriously misunderstood and misused term in relation to the political, territorial, cultural and economic needs, aspirations, and goals of Indigenous peoples living in post-colonial settler states. Archives were established as places where official records became anchors for nations in the making as they documented the accepted demise of their first peoples. As a result, the archival imagination is both a process of political work and ideological maneuvering. In the post-colonial imagination, archives have become hotbeds for revising the historical fictions and fantasies that allowed for the erasure and presumed demise of Indigenous peoples. As archives shift to include Indigenous voices, and as Indigenous archives assert their own prominence in the landscape, the archival imagination expands. This article analyzes the emergent archival imagination through the lens of sovereignty, repatriation movements, and digital technologies to expose the place of Indigenous rights, histories, and imaginations in the practical work of archives in post-colonial settler states. Using examples from my own collaborations in the United States and Canada with Indigenous communities and my work as the director of Mukurtu CMS, I examine how multiple stakeholders grapple with and infuse archival practices, tools, and work with the many nuances of sovereignty.

In this article I examine the landscape of tribal or Indigenous archival management as it relates to digital assets and, more specifically, how these might help us reimagine the intellectual property needs of local, traditional, and indigenous communities, libraries, archives, and museums as they seek to manage, preserve, and reuse their digital cultural heritage. The colonial collecting project was a destructive mechanism by which Native materials were unhinged from their local places and knowledge and at the same time used as markers of Native erasure. As part of a practical solution to contemporary intellectual property dilemmas faced by Indigenous peoples globally due in large part to the residue of the colonial landscape, I will introduce the Local Contexts project and the Traditional Knowledge License and Label platform (www.localcontexts.org) as one intervention into the sometimes-confusing arena of Indigenous intellectual property rights and the digital commons.

On 19 January 2012, the workshop Aft er the Return: Digital Repatriation and the Circulation of Indigenous Knowledge was held at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. With support from the National Science Foundation and the Smithsonian's Understanding the American Experience and Valuing World Cultures Consortia, this workshop brought together twenty-eight international participants for a debate around what happens to digital materials aft er they are returned to communities (however such communities are conceived, bounded, and lived). Th e workshop provided a unique opportunity for a critical debate about the very idea of digital return in all of its problematic manifestations, from the linguistic to the legal, as indigenous communities, archives, libraries, and museums work through the terrain of digital collaboration, return, and sharing. What follows is a report on the workshop's presentations and discussions.