Taken together, the chapters that make up Archival Returns: Central Australia and Beyond explore the myriad social, cultural, legal, technological, theoretical, and practical issues that shape the ways that cultural materials are returned to their communities of origin. The work ultimately reveals layers of complexity in the deceptively simple process of repatriation or archival return, which, properly executed, requires long-term engagement with communities and attentive, participatory work with scholars, institutions, and most importantly the communities of origin. As the editors bluntly state in their preface: “Reintegration [of archival materials] involves much more than simply obtaining copies of collections and lodging them in local repositories or returning materials to individuals on USB sticks” (xiv). While the case studies will be valuable for folklorists working in Aboriginal communities, the interplay between cultural materials, archival institutions, and communities of origin provide powerful models for the continuing decolonizing work of archivists, fieldworkers, and community members everywhere.
The book grew out of an Australian Research Council project around Central Australian archival materials, but the editors included additional case studies from outside of that area. The book’s structure follows a winding geographical path, from Central Australia to the Northern Territory and then to Western Australia, ending in Noongar country in the far southwest. The contributors include researchers, cultural-heritage workers, and academics from a variety of fields, with many Aboriginal voices included. That geographic scope and breadth along with the highly interdisciplinary slate of contributors might otherwise threaten to produce a disjointed final book. The many interconnecting themes hold the work together nicely, particularly the authors’ navigation of competing ideologies of ownership and rights, commitment to participatory archival practice, and documentation of the many outcomes of archival-return projects.
The first chapter, far more than the foreword or editors’ preface, acts as an introduction to the issues that run throughout the rest of the case studies. The authors review legal, ethical, and practical issues involved in planning and executing an archival-return project as well as possible positive and negative outcomes of return projects. Particularly salient are the passages that discuss how ethical practices of archival return expand and reconfigure traditional understandings of the mission of archives. While archives are traditionally oriented towards preservation and research access, the authors write that “knowledge holders...are more likely to be focused on finding appropriate channels to contain and transmit the performative power of the knowledge the archival objects encode, recruiting intermediaries and archivists as agents of proper process” (3). The rest of the case studies provide examples not only of bridging those ideological divides but also of creating archival-return programs that allow for community decision-making and autonomy.
Many case studies discuss issues of ownership that arise during archival return projects. The ninth chapter, “’For the Children...’: Aboriginal Australia, Cultural Access, and Archival Obligation,” consists of two narratives of archival access by Aboriginal communities and descendants: one at an institution open to access and creative reuse of materials and the other with a donor-imposed embargo. Using the two narratives, the chapter interrogates the traditional researcher-focused model of many archives and asks ethical questions about ownership of cultural documentation removed from communities of origin. The third chapter, similarly, investigates overlapping claims of ownership concerning archival linguistic materials, including claims by academics, the Lutheran Church, and the Indigenous groups from whom the material was collected. The author began the archival-return project without fully considering the “weighty views about history constructed by diverse interest groups who believe that they own history and have the correct version of it” (61). Multiple and overlapping claims of ownership, while most prevalent in these two case studies, run throughout the chapters in the book and provide models for considering ownership claims, particularly those of communities of origin, when planning an archival-return project.
Another unifying theme is the deep commitment to long-term, collaborative, participatory archival practice. In the second chapter, two Aboriginal researchers consider their own experiences finding and accessing cultural-heritage material and reintegrating it into their communities. Their deep engagement with archival sources, frustrations with some access and description policies, and ideas for strategies to expand access to Indigenous cultural-heritage materials offer visions for deeply collaborative and community-centered archival work. Similarly, the eighth chapter outlines the development of Mukurtu, open-source software built to allow digital repatriation and to allow varying levels of access guided by the norms and protocols of Indigenous communities. The authors envision archival return as a reparative process, characterized by collective work around developing ongoing relationships and collaborative strategies to describe and steward collections of Indigenous material.
Finally, the case studies are replete with examples of ongoing projects and programs that grew out of archival return, including songbooks, performances, art installations, community-mapping projects, educational materials, and digital projects. While these projects are an outgrowth of the ongoing, collaborative nature of archival return, their breadth warrants consideration for all stakeholders in cultural-documentation projects, including fieldworkers, community members, and archival institutions. Community-driven projects like these can be fruitful responses to archival return, and institutions, archivists, and fieldworkers should be prepared to support them as needed.
This collection of case studies is important for folklorists, ethnomusicologists, archivists, and anthropologists working with Aboriginal communities and cultural-heritage materials, but it warrants attention from a broader audience. Ethnographers working in areas with a history of colonization or extractive cultural-documentation programs will find it useful in considering their own projects. Archivists and curators will also find inspiration in the collaborative, community-centered focus of the projects described in the case studies. Individual case studies could easily be integrated into graduate courses in fieldwork, public folklore, archival management, or museology alongside some of the theoretical material that undergirds these projects. Most importantly, Archival Returns highlights tangible and inspiring efforts to decolonize the work of cultural-heritage institutions.
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[Review length: 950 words • Review posted on January 24, 2023]