On Research, Life, and Archives: A Conversation with Rethinking Place Mellon Post-Bac and Post-Doc Fellows
By Olivia Tencer
How do we ensure our research is deeply ethical and meaningful? What would it mean to include practices of refusal within research? On October 21st, 2022, Mellon Post-Baccalaureate Fellow Olivia Tencer and colleagues Talaya Robinson-Dancy, Luis Chavez, and Margaux Kristjansson engaged in conversation on ethical archival and research practices in a panel titled On Research, Life, and Archives: a Conversation during Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuk’s first annual conference, The DRE: Disturbance, Re-Animation, and Emergent Archives. Olivia Tencer moderated the conversation with focus on the above questions.
In thinking through decolonial methodologies to possibly disrupt and re-imagine archives, Tencer evoked the work of scholars Audra Simpson, Eve Tuck, and K.Wayne Yang to discuss concepts of “research refusal.” Through the work of these scholars, it is revealed that research itself is not always the intervention that is needed and that the academy, or other colonial institutions, is not often deserving of all the information. “Research as a colonial practice sees the right to knowledge as a form of conquest and by placing limits on research, especially by and for Indigenous peoples, limits are placed on the colonization of marginalized epistemologies and knowledge,” Tencer writes. Some stories are simply not ours to tell, to write, to take, to analyze.
Robinson-Dancy discussed how their personal identity and experience in the world has differed their archival experiences from their white colleagues in their field; “I feel like my existence as a Black historian is already disrupting the archives,” they said. This disruption is seen in the very real experience of Black scholars and researchers often facing racial profiling and discrimination by librarians and archivists whose jobs are to help support scholars in their research.
Chavez and Kristjansson also address the personal toll of archival work, especially for Native students and researchers, who can be traumatized working in archives as individuals who are part of the collective memory of Indigenous genocide and colonial oppression. Kristjansson addresses that visiting archives is visiting relations – relations that are stolen, missing, and often damaged.
On the topic of archival re-imagining and indigenizing the archives, Tencer said, “we ourselves are archives–we hold stories and knowledges, so looking to yourself is a part of archival research.” Thinking about archives outside of just the written and recorded allows for marginalized (and often Indigenous) epistemologies to be seen as archival. “We live history everyday– archives can be anywhere and anything,” Robinson-Dancy adds. To this point, Chavez highlighted the example of body and performance as an archive. In the communities that Chavez works with for his research, these communities are often presented by the colonial Academy as conquered or disappeared, but observing performance as archives presents these communities as living and thriving.
Tencer then asked: What are the ways you practice care with archival materials or archival beings? What does being in relation to archives mean to you? “Part of the care of archival materials and beings is being accountable to present violence and struggles,” Kristjansson responds. In thinking about for who and by whom are the archives constituted, as a colonial practice and value of celebrating and preserving what is often “loot,” what is the nature of the archive itself? Archival colonial records are a kind of violence in themselves, creating much of the work of researchers in the fields of Native American and Indigenous Studies to restore what the archive cannot say, what it has erased, and what it has ignored.
The panelists summarized three ways to begin decolonizing research practices: (1) Teach and apply archival/research refusal theory, practice, and pedagogy in the classroom, (2) Protect and celebrate the non-research (i.e. art, activism, community) within the Academy apparatus, (3) Participate in research oriented towards the intellectual and political sovereignty and self-determination of Indigenous nations and communities, regardless of whether you can publish it within academic spaces or mobilize it to accrue institutional or personal capital.
Further resources on Indigenizing the Archives:
Indigenizing the Archives at Bard and Beyond: A Handout
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “R-words: Refusing research.” Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities 223 (2014): 248.
Simpson, Audra. “On ethnographic refusal: Indigeneity, ‘voice’ and colonial citizenship.” Junctures: the journal for thematic dialogue 9 (2007).
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing research: Indigenous storywork as methodology. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.
Underhill, Karen J. “Protocols for Native American archival materials.” RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage 7, no. 2 (2006): 134-145.
U.S. Congress, Senate, Report 101-473: Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), act of 1990. Accessed https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nagpra/index.htm
Farmer, Ashley D., Steven D. Booth, Tracy Drake, Raquel Flores-Clemons, Erin Glasco, Skyla S. Hearn, and Stacie Williams. “Toward an Archival Reckoning.” The American Historical Review 127, no. 2 (2022): 799-829.
Contact the Rethinking Place Team:
Olivia Tencer, Mellon Post-Baccalaureate Fellow
Talaya Robinson-Dancy, Mellon Post-Baccalaureate Fellow
Luis Chávez, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Margaux Kristjansson, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow