Further Infomation

Hi Kelsey,

Your wiki page is coming along very nicely! I really like your modern approach to the topic with the section at the end on technology and digitization.

I have just a few comments. In the section "Representations of Indigenous Groups" you very briefly mention archives being used as ways to omit any humanizing representation of the colonized. Have you found anything further on this? Why they were seen as unimportant to record in the archives? What factors (e.g. relationships between colonized and mother country) created this practice? I really don't know anything about archives in this setting, so this was just an area I was more curious about as I read your page. I began thinking about areas where the colonized were seen as less than human, and how this impacted record creation and preservation for materials on them.

Also, are there specific examples from different countries that you could include in sections such as "Archives as Defense of Imperialism," "Representations of Indigenous Groups," "Establishing a New Identity," etc.? As I read these sections I found myself wanting to learn more about it with real examples.

Thanks for the feedback, I intend to go into a bit more detail on the section of representations under colonialism. Basically, what I've found is that there were certain individuals and groups who thought documenting indigenous culture was important, but that was generally in a scientific sense. That is, they were anthropologists, folklorists, ethnographers, who studied indigenous culture and therefore documented it in that way. I have read some compelling arguments about how that scientific interest was a reflection of the victorian/imperialist attitude of like, knowing about something is how you have control over it. This argument discusses how maps of regions were important to knowing what territory was owned by whom, and ethnographies are like the social/cultural extension of that. So, I might go into that a bit more, but I was sort of torn about how much academic discourse (eg., historiography and interpretations) would be appropriate for a wiki.