Chasing the Monolith:
The Mirage of "the Archive"

Words by Eng Sengsavang

Ruins of the Metroon of classical Athens in the Agora housing the city archives. Photo credit: Dorieo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Of all the words in the archival glossary, the most contested and cited is that word that constitutes the central object and mystery of the entire discipline, its raison d’être, its itness: archive. In critical discourses and popular culture, the term “the archive” is often used as a stand-in for official power – as if there is only one kind of archive, and as if the only archives that exist are those of governments, powerful institutions, or the privileged. But to speak of archives in the definite and the singular (“the archive”) is to abstract archives from their multiple and diverse instances in the world. “The archive” is a bit of a mirage: it can only be seen from a distance. And from afar, it suggests the outline of a monolithic archive, one that obscures the true diversity of archives that exist in other forms outside of direct state or institutional control.

From up close, “the archive” dissolves into near meaninglessness. Archives come in a variety of manifestations and designs, including indigenous archives, local and community archives, grassroots archives, personal and family archives, and oral histories, to name just a few. These archives reveal perspectives and histories that serve not only as counterpoints or counternarratives to official bodies of records: they, too, constitute the archival record. They do not stand in opposition to the archival record – they are part of the record, as essential and legitimate as the archives of states or powerful entities, and they deserve to be recognized as such. Different groups have also adopted and adapted various archival methodologies for their own purposes, to assert independence and agency over the construction of their archives and over the histories and narratives those archives register.

Welcome sign, unceded Tsleil-Waututh Nation territory, North Vancouver, British Columbia. Photo credit: BillB2000, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

This first became clear to me when I worked for Tsleil-Waututh Nation (TWN), an indigenous government and community with traditional territories in British Columbia, Canada. I was hired to help establish their archives, one of several experts external to the community that TWN seeks out in various fields – anthropology, cartography, archives – to help realize their goals. TWN expected me to share the knowledge and training I brought and to apply the tools of the trade to organize and describe their archives. Like indigenous cultures across the large and varied swathe of land we now call Canada, the Tsleil-Wautt have survived continual attempts at subjugation by European settlers and by the Canadian government through successive generations. In the 21st century, with a modestly-sized community, they are thriving. Their archives include interviews with elders and other community members that could serve as primary research material and sources of potential evidence to nourish any future activities for establishing rights and protecting the territories its members have inhabited for millennia.

Not only do the archives represent an effort to preserve the knowledge, identity, and history of the Tsleil-Wautt people, it is part of an interdisciplinary strategy that seeks to work both with and against official power structures. Archival science serves as one type of system amongst a web of interconnected disciplines consciously employed by TWN, in an approach that “combines traditional Indigenous science with western science” (https://twnation.ca/about/our-departments/treaty-lands-resources/). This recognition and respect for distinct kinds of knowledge within different cultural traditions, and the foresight to interweave both, is remarkable. During my short time there (I was a student completing a professional co-op), TWN was also in the process of developing a controlled vocabulary that mapped terms and proper nouns, including place names, in the language of the Tsleil-Wautt people, Hunq’eme’nem. The vocabulary and geographic re-mapping were part of an effort to reconstruct a language and culture that had endured centuries of attempted erasure. By developing their own controlled vocabulary, TWN was also mobilizing the tools of the archival discipline to reinstate their own worldview and to reclaim authority as stewards of their own body of knowledge. The vocabulary was to be incorporated into the database acquired to describe and provide access to TWN’s archives.

The act of naming, creating, gathering, and organizing records into an archive, and the use and adaptation of archival methodologies to do so, means different things depending on the context and circumstances. It can be an act of reclamation and resistance. TWN’s archives are not public. Considering that in previous eras, when information about, and knowledge residing within, indigenous communities was taken through various means by colonial societies, the ability of indigenous communities today to control access to their own archives is essential. TWN’s archives exist principally to serve and nourish the community, as part of the tangible proof of their history and identity and also, inseparably, as a body of evidence, in the context of the continual work of establishing rights and protections - for example, the right to be consulted in important territorial decisions and actions, on national, provincial, and local levels of governance. The archives, in this sense, document the “of-ness” of a people to a place. They are a physical extension of the lived experience of a community, almost as if the archives are the community, and the community is the archives.

Archives such as TWN’s also have an importance and meaning beyond their originating communities. Their existence infinitely enriches the archival record - enriches what some might call “the archive,” that idea of a generalized archive that seems to mutate to fit any argument. How do such archives fit into discourses that declaim the power of “the archive”? Local and community archives challenge the notion that “the archive” can be conceived of in a one-sided way and as a homogenous, generalized entity. They are also living proof against the idea that archives are dead. There is a creative and constructive side of archives: they have meaning in the present and can play an essential role in helping to shape the livelihood and future of originating communities. They can embody a tangible hope and vitality for a community. Besides the fact that archives are not fixed in time – they accumulate and change, evolve and grow – the structures, technologies, concepts and practices that shape how archives are formed and represented evolve too.

The work of diversifying archives and of interrogating their relationship to the histories they are supposed to document will never be exhausted or complete. But just as the tools of archival control can be used as apparatuses to undermine rights, to silence or hide truths, or to exercise more subtle forms of control, they can equally be a means to power and a generative force for a given community or a group. When it comes to the grammar of archives, the indefinite and the plural are worth aspiring to.

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