Archiving Indigenous Stories Using Indigenous Research Methods

The project I focused on was The People And The Text, an archive of Indigenous literature until 1992. The project is based out of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, and with the support of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the latter falling under the Canadian government. It aims not only to archive the writing of Indigenous Northern North American people (including Native American and First Nations communities) but to work in collaboration with Indigenous communities to put together a manual on Indigenous research methods. The project wants to avoid archiving Indigenous literature with the same colonial framework and methodology for how it gets done and whose work gets archived. The work is an attempt to counter the erasure of Indigenous literature from academia. According to the project’s about page “settlers used literature to consolidate a narrative of Canada starring the British-descended resulting in university curricula that featured the British canon.” Thus, the works of Indigenous writers were often neglected. The aim is that by creating this as a digital archive, universities as well as individuals would have more Indigenous literature accessible to them, and therefore make use of it and highlight the neglected narratives of Indigenous writers.

http://thepeopleandthetext.ca/

One Reply to “Archiving Indigenous Stories Using Indigenous Research Methods”

  1. Hi Rose,
    I think you did a great job finding the achieves who, what, where, how’s. It’s important to emphasis the importance of indigenous literature and history without the influences of the colonizers, making this an important project! I believe it’s very significant for this project to acquire more attention because this gives Indigenous people a source of acknowledgment and to be seen/heard.

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