Indigenizing Digital History: Tensions between Opportunities and Ethics

A hallmark of the North American colonial process was the production and dissemination of knowledge about Indigenous peoples through the journals and records of colonizers. The violent, and virulent, practices that led to widespread disease, genocide, trauma, and displacement in the Americas were bolstered by data collection and distribution that relied upon physical death and cultural destruction of Indigenous peoples. Equally as damaging were 20th century preservation efforts by non-Indigenous peoples that form the core of most cultural heritage collections. Analog archival collections about Native American, First Nations, and Indigenous peoples were constructed through “salvage” ethnography which sought to document “disappearing” peoples. Collectors, anthropologists, and historians embarked on decades-long collecting efforts that led to the extraction (forcibly and otherwise) of cultural objects, knowledge, and even physical bodies from Native communities. They created the data culture that most historians operate within as they work with indigenous materials. For Indigenous communities (as well as other underrepresented communities), data and historical research can be dangerous because it can easily replicate the ills of colonialism, which stripped cultural knowledge and objects from their communities for the benefit of non-Indigenous peoples.

Exploring digital history projects that focus on the use of colonial data in the North American context, this presentation focuses on the ways in which digital history methods can serve as extractive processes that continue the project of American colonization. This presentation explores the tensions that exist between recovery efforts that seek to enrich our knowledge of Native peoples and their communities and the struggle of digital historians to reckon with using data that was, and continues, to exert violence on Indigenous communities.