The Animacy of Indigenous Archives, Objects as Being

In this visual presentation I am bringing forward Indigenous conceptualizations of the archive as a gathering of embodied animate and agential knowledge. In her essay, “Re-imagining the Image Archive,” the Anishinaabe scholar Julie Nagam positions the Indigenous archive as inscribed within and on the land. She describes an Indigenous space as “a network of relationships akin to the relationships of rivers and topographies of the land” (Nagam, 2011). A key characteristic of the Indigenous archive requires that individuals participate “in the production and reproduction of knowledge by “being there,” by being part of the transmission”. My work on this panels asks how Indigenous archival forms, which include mnemonic objects, teaching bundles, oral narratives and performance, contribute to the gathering of Indigenous knowledges for dissemination within the Academy and within the proprietary spaces of Indigenous
community teaching lodges.