I write as a Birrbay and Dhanggati woman of the Gathang language group, a language practitioner, and someone who manages a First Nations archives access team, which means I’ve sat on both sides of your reference desk.
Consider me a friendly interpreter between your world and mine. Friendly, but honest.
Somewhere in your stacks right now is a tape, or a notebook, or a word list. In your systems it’s an item: catalogue number, condition report, climate-controlled shelf. Your professional instinct is curatorial.
Describe it, preserve it, protect it from damage, control its use. None of that is malicious, and plenty of it is necessary.
But it mistakes the carrier for the thing carried.
The good news is that nobody is asking you to invent anything. The roadmap exists, and Indigenous archivists wrote most of it.
- The 2019 Tandanya Adelaide Declaration calls on archives to recognise Indigenous knowledge authorities, ownership and self-determination.
- The Indigenous Archives Collective, established in 2011, has articulated the Right of Reply: our peoples’ right to correct, contextualise and respond to what your records say about us.
- The ATSILIRN Protocols, published in 1995, have offered practical guidance to your sector for decades. Your institution has probably endorsed at least one of these.
The endorsement was the easy part. What communities are waiting on is implementation, which so far has been slow, uneven and often symbolic.
