"Innocent Legal Fictions": Archival Convention and the North Saanich Treaty of 1852
The British colonial project created culturally mediated records to depict the land and Aboriginal peoples of North America. Such narratives, registers, and surveys became the predominant archival record of colonial contact. Recent Supreme Court of Canada decisions on Aboriginal rights have determin...
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Veröffentlicht in: | Archivaria 2010-10, Vol.70 (70), p.45-94 |
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Format: | Artikel |
Sprache: | eng |
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Zusammenfassung: | The British colonial project created culturally mediated records to depict the land and Aboriginal peoples of North America. Such narratives, registers, and surveys became the predominant archival record of colonial contact. Recent Supreme Court of Canada decisions on Aboriginal rights have determined that traditional Aboriginal methods of social memory have necessary evidential value as both a countervailing resource to the archival textual record, and a culturally sensitive representation of the Aboriginal experience of colonialism. Not unlike Canadian jurisprudence, archival practice must reconsider its paradigms to address the non-textual materiality and distributed authority embodied in colonial Aboriginal evidence. As a case study, this article examines the North Saanich Treaty, concluding that conventional archival interpretations identify the silences and discrepancies of the textual colonial record. But critics note that conventional archival method remains tied to its textual and sovereign paradigms. It does not address the often vague and uncertain relationship between the record and the manifold power structures, cultures, and traditions that surround the record’s formation and archival disposition. Archivists cannot interpret the multiple, relative truths of power and authority that inspired a record’s creation. Archivists can, however, address the absence of Aboriginal roles in the context of colonial records creation. As our archival descriptions move toward a detached and digitally interconnected archival context this becomes more practical. The content of such a juxtaposed context could depict relevant languages and worldviews as described by appropriate Aboriginal representation. This avoids redescribing colonial records and puts them in a deeper context of both the colonial records creating environment and the discourse of the contemporary descriptions. It also provides for the participation of oral histories of Aboriginal elders that do not easily fit the format of our national descriptive standards. |
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ISSN: | 0318-6954 |