Who has the right to represent Native history?
The past several decades have seen a massive shift in debates over who owns and has the right to tell Native American history and stories. For centuries, non-Native actors have collected, stolen, sequestered, and gained value from Native stories and documents, human remains, and sacred objects. However, thanks to the work of Native activists, Native history is now increasingly being repatriated back to the control of tribes and communities. Indigenous Archival Activism takes readers into the heart of these debates by tracing one tribe's fifty-year fight to recover and rewrite their history.
Rose Miron tells the story of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation and their Historical Committee, a group of mostly Mohican women who have been collecting and reorganizing historical materials since 1968. She shows how their work is exemplary of how tribal archives can be used strategically to shift how Native history is accessed, represented, written and, most importantly, controlled. Based on a more than decade-long reciprocal relationship with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation, Miron's research and writing is shaped primarily by materials found in the tribal archive and ongoing conversations and input from the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee.
As a non-Mohican, Miron is careful to consider her own positionality and reflects on what it means for non-Native researchers and institutions to build reciprocal relationships with Indigenous nations in the context of academia and public history, offering a model both for tribes undertaking their own reclamation projects and for scholars looking to work with tribes in ethical ways.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"Indigenous Archival Activism is a necessary volume on the intersection of Indigenous knowledge loss, recovery, and production in the context of settler colonialism. Presenting a community history centered on institution-building, knowledge, education, and activism, Rose Miron challenges an accepted narrative about a vanished people with a deeply researched project that centers their persistence and relevance."-Jacki Thompson Rand, Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"Brilliantly narrating the story of a tribal community's reclamation of their history, Indigenous Archival Activism represents a path forward for tribes to tell their own stories and is a must-read for archivists, researchers, and tribal historians working with/in Indian Country. Rose Miron contests the mythology of the 'last of the Mohicans,' speaking to the vibrancy of the Stockbridge-Munsee people and celebrating contemporary Indigeneity."-Shannon Martin, Lynx Clan, Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians; former director, Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways
"Indigenous Archival Activism provides a framework for archives to radically transgress beyond the utility of scholarship and into the projects and visions held by tribal communities, embarking on a new direction of ethical scholarship with community engagement at the center."-The Public Historian
Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Für Beruf und Forschung
Für höhere Schule und Studium
Illustrationen
34 black and white illustrations and three maps
Maße
Höhe: 216 mm
Breite: 140 mm
Dicke: 25 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-5179-1270-3 (9781517912703)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Rose Miron is director of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library. In the creation of this book, she worked closely with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation, especially the tribe's Historical Committee, whose members wrote the Foreword.
