Reclaiming the Archive: Reading Bureaucratic Silence through Indigenous Memory

• In Event: Truth and Healing in California: Land, Education, and the Remembering, Restorying, Reclaiming Project

Abstract

Across California, the historical record has long served settler aims—cataloging land transfers, enforcing assimilation, and concealing Tribal presence through calculated silence. Yet even within the bureaucratic language of newspapers, land deeds, and legislative files, traces of Indigenous life, loss, and refusal remain. This presentation engages the archival strand of the RRR project, exploring how research becomes a form of relational accountability when archives are approached not merely as data sources, but as sites of responsibility and accountability. These materials are technologies of settler violence, where Indigenous names were changed, families displaced, and erasure encoded into record. Yet they are also sites that can be unsettled. Through protocols of care, Tribal consultation, and interpretive methods grounded in love, the project asks: What might it mean to read not only what is present, but what was silenced? What becomes visible when research centers community memory, ceremonial timelines, and Tribal epistemologies?

This work does not aim to gather evidence for institutional validation. It seeks to surface truths that matter to Native communities now—exposing how past land and education policies continue to shape the present. This is archival work in service of healing: reweaving family stories, recovering place names, and refusing settler timelines. Reclaiming the archive requires a shift in method and meaning. It foregrounds Indigenous ways of knowing that hold silence, story, and song as valid forms of evidence. It reframes archival labor as ceremonial and sovereign—an act not of extraction, but of return. In doing so, it contributes to a collective process of unforgetting and reclaims the archive as a site of resurgence, responsibility, and Indigenous presence.

Author

• Heather Ponchetti Daly, University of California - San Diego