Indigenous Archival Futurisms

Join Kristin Kozar and Kim Lawson, both from UBC's Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre, in this special Leading Scholars event.

Kristin Kozar is currently the Interim Executive Director at the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre and her permanent position is as the Indigenous Engagement and Programming Manager and Co-Lead of the Oral Testimony Program. A member of the Hwlitsum First Nation, she served on council for six years. She has completed her MLIS degree in 2018 with a concentration on First Nation curriculum and has previously worked at what was formerly known as UBC Aboriginal Health and has worked on a project where she researched and analyzed how to use Blockchain to give Indigenous peoples and communities autonomy over their own records. Kristin’s research focuses on Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Residential School records.

Kim Lawson is a member of the Heiltsuk Nation, an archivist and a librarian. Her job title is Research and Community Liaison Librarian at the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre at UBC. Time with family and community members, (which is at the centre of traditional culture), is very important to her. Her Master’s thesis, “Precious Fragments: First Nations Materials in Archives, Libraries and Museums,” was written to acknowledge Indigenous cultural professionals (archivists, librarians and knowledge keepers), who are doing important memory, information and cultural work that was largely unknown outside their communities and undocumented in LIS literature. While she was Archivist/Librarian at the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, she developed an approach for archives to do their own digital preservation of fragile media recordings and completed her MLIS from UBC’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies. She also worked at Xwi7xwa Library, UBC. She sees the interconnectedness of education, cultural humility, wellness and information services as a crucial aspect of Indigenous informatics and community resilience.

What and where is “the archive”? What does an archive do? And how can an archive be animated and activated in ways that both address its complex power structures and oft-times embeddedness in colonial, imperial or otherwise hegemonic epistemologies and modes of capture, and search for creative responses to and refusals of its defining absences and thefts? How do scholars, artists, archivists, librarians and activists differently engage with various archives in order to think through questions of history and (individual and collective) memory, embodiment and materiality, loss and recovery, absence and presence, violence and healing, theft and repatriation, silence and testimony? And how might these archival engagements serve as powerful starting points for creative acts, community action, and political intervention––including ones that turn toward other ways of knowing, remembering, and telling? This series begins with a roundtable conversation that approaches the question and the problem of the archive from multiple disciplinary perspectives. The following two sessions take the the form of critical duets, in which artists, activists, librarians and archivists enter into dialogue about the ways in which their research, art-making, and/or practice engages with, responds to, resists, revisions, disrupts, or abandons the archive.

Series Conveners: Olivia Michiko Gagnon, Theatre & Film; Kelly McCormick, History; Leora Morris, Theatre & Film; and Ori Tenenboim, Journalism, Writing and Media