Looking Ahead: GLAMs and Social Change
Digital activism, decolonization, repatriation
Despite their differences, all GLAMs have the potential to be spaces that not only document but also facilitate social change; some organizations work these priorities more directly into their mandates than others. Examples of archives and museums that foreground principles of social justice include Canada’s Museum for Human Rights as well as Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre (SRSC), which forms part of Algoma University’s archives and special collections. The SRSC is an important repository of records regarding the histories of Canada’s residential schools, which have been used to document the genocide of Indigenous people (Truth and Reconciliation Commission 2015), and which have been digitized and made available on their website.
It is important to note the distinction, however, between (physical or digital) GLAMs that have been created with the purpose of documenting and/or displaying histories of social change, and those which are more directly tied to colonial histories that now seek to decolonize or repatriate their collections. Both come with their own challenges and politics in the digital era, given that digital archives (and the digitization of archives) requires new record infrastructures and interfaces. As Jeurgens and Karabino write, it may be that archival institutions and personnel cannot be entirely blamed for actions of the past, “but they are responsible for the interfaces, the archival infrastructures, the representational systems they create to define, manage, categorize and give access to these records” (2020: 217). This responsibility must also be extended to digital archives (Cushman, 2013).
In addition to questions about the nature and importance of digital records, there has been a great deal of interest in whether digitization can help to decolonize archives, or otherwise mitigate the colonial power structures of GLAMs discussed throughout this module. Certainly digitization can help increase access to archives beyond just those people able to visit an archive in person, and creates opportunities to change the structure of the archive. It also presents a way to preserve records in digital form that might be hard to preserve in their physical format, especially for under-resourced archives. However, digitization is not a panacea. Unless great care is taken in designing the online archive, it may end up perpetuating the existing cataloguing schemes and replicate them in digital format, along with their associated power structures. It can equally erase the evidence of those power structures completely, when the goal shouldn’t be to hide that they existed, just to remove their power.
Another avenue explored by GLAMs working in relationship with communities is the potential for “digital repatriation” of cultural heritage materials. In one of the required readings, Kate Hennessy discusses the creation of the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Culture (GRASAC), which was created to explore the use of digital information technology to “reunite Great Lakes Heritage that is scattered across museums and archives in North America and Europe with Aboriginal community knowledge, memory, and perspectives (Hennessy, 2016, citing GRASAC, 2011).
The Chicago Field Museum provides one example of an institution working with individual communities to address and, perhaps, repair some of the harm caused by colonial museums. For the Field Museum, this process has included first acknowledging their role in soliciting, housing, and displaying ancestral remains and other cultural heritage items that were “collected in profoundly unethical ways” (Field Museum, 2022) it also involves working carefully on repatriation policies in ways that are respectful of community protocols, including ceremonial practice. These efforts have resulted in several changes and outputs. One output of interest for this digital spatial humanities course is their Repatriation Map, a regularly-updated map and research tool that geolocates the number of records they house of human remains for a given country, province, or state.
Beyond the map, there are several stories of repatriation initiatives in partnership with individual communities or communities from shared territories. One such project is with Dokis First Nation, an Anishinaabeg community upon whose ancestral and treaty territory Nipissing University is located. After several years working in relationship on the “Dead Island Repatriation Project” (led by Dokis First Nation, on behalf of the First Nations of the Robinson Huron Treaty of 1850), the Field Museum repatriated the remains of six ancestors to their homelands in October, 2021. The following statement from the Museum’s press release highlights parts of the research and repatriation process, which involved using museum and archival records, as well as oral and written histories from across Anishinaabeg and Robinson Huron Treaty territory, to determine the provenance of the ancestral remains:
Over the last several years, Dokis First Nation has been leading the “Dead Island Repatriation Project” on behalf and with the consent of First Nation communities within the Robinson Huron Treaty. Dokis representatives and Field Museum staff conducted collaborative research to determine how these six ancestral remains came to be in the Museum’s care: they found that anthropologist Thomas Proctor Hall (1858-1942) removed these individuals from their graves in 1891. At the time, Hall took these remains on behalf of anthropologist Franz Boas (1839-1915) for anthropological exhibits at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Some of these exhibits, including the remains of these six individuals, became part of the Museum’s collections after the conclusion of the Exposition. (Field Museum, 2021)
Repatriation by no means erases the harms of colonization, nor is it an end point; it is perhaps best understood as but one step in an ongoing process of decolonization. Furthermore, Indigenous scholars and activists have recently begun to call into question whether decolonization is truly possible, given the entrenched colonial values of knowledge and cultural heritage institutions. They caution against GLAMs co-opting the term as another “buzzword” that might further benefit the institutions (e.g., in securing funding) more than the communities with whom the purport to be reconciling. This is to suggest repatriation and decolonization efforts are not worth pursuing in the context of digital humanities; it does, however, highlight the need for an ethics of carein digital humanities research.
Ethics of Care in Digital Research and Storytelling
The intensification of digital advancements over the past few years has led to rapid development and improvement of online research and collections databases. These changes come with new ethical questions, from digital property rights to culturally-specific principles of research to what has been called the “public right to know” through open-access data policies (see Colley, 2015). The rush to digitize as much as possible, however, often obscures the possibility that increased access is not inherently good and can sometimes cause harm, even if it is unintentional or goes unnoticed by researchers. What happens, for example, to data sets that have been collected on unethical and sometimes violent grounds? To what extent is this critical historical information available to the researchers who use them?
For example, when famous anthropologist, Franz Boas, was in charge of the physical anthropology building at the World Columbian Exposition of 1893 (also known as the Chicago World’s Fair), he oversaw exhibits featuring the science of craniology, which included skulls and human remains collected from Indigenous communities and burial grounds (Pöhl, 2008; see Greer and Restoule, 2017). It now understood that the measuring of Indigenous people’s heads was unethical and an act of scientific racism. What is perhaps more concerning is that the data collected for the exhibit continue to be used uncritically and ahistorically today, often by researchers who are not aware of their provenance. It is for reasons like this that digital and spatial archives must always be consulted with care and put into critical historical context as much as possible.
Complex questions also arise regarding who “owns” the objects in an archive, and who gets to decide who has access to them. To use an example, there might be cultural restrictions on who can view a certain object or photograph. In these cases, would making this object or image available to an even wider audience constitute a form of harm against the culture or community the object came from? Or, in the cases of photographs, should the people in the photo or their families have a say in whether the images are made widely available? This may be a challenging thought for some who are used to thinking of the wide availability of research materials as unambiguously good and desirable, but it is certainly an important ethical consideration.
In light of these ethical and methodological questions, feminist scholars across the humanities have pointed to the need for more dedicated ethics of care in digital archival (or GLAM) research (Crossen-White, 2015; Mackinnon, 2021). As Crossen-White argues, there is a tendency to treat digital media as somehow disconnected from human and lived experiences; however, researchers must apply the same care to personal stories found through digital archives as they would to interviews or other knowledge-generating practices. These include considerations of the power relations that shape how digital archives are used, risks and benefits to particular communities, questions about authority (who has the right to extract information and share stories), as well as community-specific principles such as First Nations Principles of OCAP (ownership, control, access, and possession). How OCAP principles are taken up by different communities may vary, but are guided by an overarching idea that “First Nations people understand their own needs and are in the best position to govern their own information” (First Nations Governance Information Centre, 2014).
While the level of detail and immediacy that can be gleaned in rapid searches through online databases is indeed both remarkable and useful, Holly Crossen-White notes that it raises new ethical questions about privacy, confidentiality, and anonymity. For example, she highlights ethical concerns regarding the disclosure of personal or sensitive details about “forgotten individuals,” questions of anonymity and privacy (for researchers and research subjects), and concerns about ongoing commitments to equity-seeking communities. This care-ful approach to using and sharing digital materials builds on what Helen Nissenbaum (2010) calls “contextual integrity,” which acknowledges that expectations about privacy are not universal but are situated within particular contexts that may change across communities, times, actors, and data. Furthermore, operating and using digital archives with a feminist ethics of care (that includes attentiveness to context, privacy, and relationship) challenges the tendency to normalize contextual detachment and lack of privacy in the digital age (Tiidenberg, 2018; Mackinnon, 2021).
Ever-changing digital technologies provide new opportunities for re-imagining how historical knowledge is collected, assembled, and disseminated, including the potential for mobilizing social justice projects. The uncomfortable and harmful histories of GLAMs, and the universities that are interlinked with them, are not something that can be changed or reconciled overnight; some argue that their links to colonial power relations can never fully be extricated. This does not mean GLAMs, and digital humanities researchers who use their collections, should abandon projects that seek to repair inequalities and wrongdoings; rather, they should do so with the aforementioned ethics of care, including a critical understanding of the histories that shape today’s storytelling.