I’ve got news. My book will explain how Archives repeat settler colonial fictions that maintain sources of sovereign power and impede archival efforts to decolonize core archival structures such as description, collecting, and intellectual property. I center archival recordkeeping as a colonial mechanism through which the US settler state reproduces colonial fictions.
I’ll cover topics like tribal recognition politics, web development, GenAI, digital asset management, copyright, decolonization, and more.
Archivists/data professionals are expected to be familiar with issues surrounding Indigenous records. US Indigenous peoples are American citizens; their records, material culture, bodies, and data are found throughout all types of Archives including private, college and university, corporate, government (federal, state, tribal), historical society, museums, religious organizations, and special collections.
This book is the culmination of my responses to people–from my higher education courses, to job interviews in the cultural heritage sector, to data professional peers–believing the fiction that Indigenous peoples do not have digital material; many can not conceive how digital asset management, web development, and digital preservation applies to Indigenous data, collections, and records in Archives.
This colonial logic and these career experiences pushed me for the last decade to publish widely on socio-technical data issues pointing out the intersections and borders (colonial logics) between technology and social power structures. My published works on Archives and Indigenous relations (bodies, knowledge, collections) issues can be found in American Archivist, Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, Phil. Trans. B, Collection Management, and First Monday.