Repatriating the Archive: A Critical Archivist Collaboration With Canal City Youth

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 10:50 am
  In Roundtable Session: Lighting Our Way Home: Recovering Community, Youth, and Educator Stories as Resistance (Table 27)

Abstract

In the 2018 Marvel movie, “Black Panther,” Killmonger confronts the colonial legacies of museums, raising important questions about the repatriation of stolen artifacts. Set in a London museum, Killmonger orchestrates a heist to reclaim the stolen vibranium of his Wakandan ancestors. This iconic scene, like the iconic “Black Panther'' films more broadly, comments on the contemporary impact of European colonialism, ways of resistance, and the need to redress historical harm. While in the 2022 sequel, “Wakanda Forever,” the competition for natural resources amongst Western nations continues to put Wakanda at risk, the story also offers commentary on the genocidal impact of contact between Spanish conquistadors and the Indigenous Talokans. It is significant the Wakandans and Talokans engage a fugitive (Givens, 2021) existence outside of a western-eurocentric-white-gaze, as Wakanda is protected by a vibranium shield and the Talokans find refuge in the ocean where they acquire skills and abilities–both necessary to sustain these societies and cultures. In each instance, “Black Panther” offers a counterstory, centering Afro-centric and Indigenous-centric narratives of survivance (Vizenor, 2008), clapping back at historiography: the writing of history and whose histories get told. European colonizers burned books, sought to destroy languages, and stole artifacts–going to great lengths to erase cultures. Through the creation of museums (like the British Museum in London), archives, and anthropological research–Europeans use(d) these means to write a history to concretize notions of their superiority. White supremacy is the primary legacy of colonialism that marks all Western institutions; this is inclusive of schools that have serve(d) as machinery in the social (re)production of hegemonic white supremacy culture. From the archives, some histories are preserved and from this fragmented documentation, a master narrative breathes life, and school curriculum is derived. Like Killmonger, Ethnic Studies, as a multidisciplinary project in U.S. public schools offers a critical counterstory to resist and redress the nation’s colonial history and racist p(ast)resent.
This past summer, 6 Canal City Ethnic Studies youth scholars entered an ongoing dialogue with the likes of Black Feminist Scholar Saidiya Hartman (2008), multidisciplinary artist Alexandra Bell (2019), and the Taíno people of the Caribbean (Estevez, 2019) in a critical archivist project. Through a community-academic social justice partnership in action (Castañeda and Krupczynski, 2018) between the UMass College of Education, CCES, and the Canal City History Museum, youth created a digital archive to document the existence of the Canal City Ethnic Studies program, during a time where the school district continues to move towards dismantling ethnic studies. These youth sought to reimagine archival experiences where their stories are preserved and can be found in years to come. In the white-dominated profession of archiving (Skinner & Hubert, 2022), this diverse group of ethnic studies scholars entered the archives as a way of resistance. Through document analysis, fieldnotes, interviews with youth, and a focus group with adult-ally program coordinators– this critical ethnography is grounded in community-engaged methods (Warren, 2018) documenting a collective story of what accountability, youth-engaged research, and repatriation looks like in action.

Author

• Dana Altshuler, University of Massachusetts - Amherst