Author’s Note: This book chapter appears in the book The Collector and the Collected: Decolonizing Area Studies Librarianship, edited by Meagan Browndorf, Erin Pappas, and Anna Arays, published in 2021 by Library Juice Press. The copy provided here may contain slight differences from the published version. Abstract: The way cultural memory institutions (libraries, archives, and museums) confer authority pits Western concepts like copyright and access against Indigenous legal orders; rage then, is an appropriate response when we consider items in collections as more than objects and rather, as relatives that are barred from being in relationship with us. The chapter centres Indigenous thought on the concepts of collecting and authority and calls for a more nuanced understanding of how we might be in relation to each other. The chapter is structured around first querying collections: the selfish impulse of collecting and the absences in collections, as well as the coloniality of the archive and rage. It covers how authority for Indigenous collections are not currently situated in communities, but in outsiders, and reframes ethical collections as ones who situate the people, not the stuff. The chapter ends with a discussion of animacy, and therefore, relationality: considering collections not as groups of things, but as our relatives and our responsibilities. This chapter emerged from a keynote given in Calgary in March 2018 called “‘we talk to these things you call artifacts’: Competing authorities, harm, and collections.” It references Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking my Library” and introduces the idea that collecting is often prompted by a singular, individual joy which obscures violence, harm, and silences in that collection. Collections Are Our Relatives Disrupting the Singular, White Man’s Joy That Shaped Collections Jessie Loyer Most of the collections in libraries, archives, or museums have emerged from a colonial impulse: a singular, white man’s joy. A collection here is defined as a group of materials within a cultural memory institution, whether that is a library, archive, or museum. From an Indigenous perspective, the boundaries between these institutional categories are more porous, particularly in the way that material culture, or the physical items often found in the “colonial treasure chests”1 of libraries, archives, and museums, carry Indigenous knowledge. This chapter is directed at those who work in cultural memory institutions: librarians, archivists, museum workers, educators. When I use the pronouns “we” or “us,” I refer to all of us in these positions of stewarding collections. Our jobs have been shaped by our collections being understood as inanimate objects, emerging from the joy of a singular white man, and this history is in direct tension with how Indigenous communities consider these collections to be living relatives. 2 1 Sherry Farrell Racette, “Looking for Stories and Unbroken Threads: Museum Artifacts as Women’s History and Cultural Legacy,” in Restoring the Balance: First Nations Women, Community and Culture. ed. Gail Guthrie Valaskakis. Madeline Dion Stout, and Eric Guimond (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2009), 283. 2 I have a Cree and Métis perspective, and in this chapter, share the experiences of Indigenous cultural memory workers from these two communities, as well as communities other than my own—Blackfoot (whose territory includes what is currently southern Alberta, Canada, and northern Montana, United States), Wiradjuri (central New South Wales, Australia), and Catawba (North and South Carolina, United States)—to show the ways that these communities also consider collections to be their living relatives. The communities included here are illustrative, and by no means comprehensive. Browndorf, Pappas, and Arays The Collector and the Collected A masculinist impulse surfaces in theorists’ perspectives on collecting and in the way our collections are named. When Walter Benjamin wrote about his own joy in “Unpacking My Library,” his individual sense of order and disorder emerged in the curation of his personal library. Collections, for Benjamin, were most potently joyful when they were personal and reflected the owner back to themself. 3 His pleasure is singular, but is echoed in the writing of other white men reflecting on their collections: Umberto Eco’s “On Unread Books” and Alberto Manguel’s “Library at Night” both delight in the pleasure of their own books—of reading them, but also of curating and possessing this personal collection. This focus on the personal, even when collections are public, can be tracked by how often archival and museum collections are named by or for their donors. Libraries are frequently characterized in the popular imagination by Carnegie libraries: the “now-familiar temple-fronted library type”4 that were bankrolled by the wealthy Andrew Carnegie. With a strict application process that betrayed his wariness of the working poor, communities could be met with obstacles: sometimes the Carnegie organization “refused to release funds for design that failed to meet his stringent planning guidelines.”5 Despite the guidelines that privileged the social improvement philosophy of his philanthropy, these buildings still centered the man, Carnegie, in name, and in fondness: “Library users might then look upon Carnegie as a rich uncle, who deserved respect, obedience, and affection, and whose affection in return precluded any class resentment.”6 The valorization of these men who shaped collections persists. Though the collection does not bear his name, Eric Lafferty Harvie’s singular joy in collecting created the original priorities of the Glenbow Museum’s collection: “the remarkable vision…his impressive collection of art, artifacts, and historical documents… 3 Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking my Library,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt. (New York: Schocken, 1968.), 67. 4 Abigail A. Van Slyck, Free to All: Carnegie Libraries & American Culture, 1890–1820 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 45. 5 Van Slyck, Free to All, 44. 6 Van Slyck, Free to All, 18. 4 Collections Are Our Relatives playing an essential role in defining Western Canadian culture.”7 Similarly, the Library of Congress, whose classification system is still used in many academic libraries, was shaped by the donation of Thomas Jefferson’s private library and his own personal interests, topics he found important: science, history, philosophy, and fine arts.8 Singular joy creates, shapes, names, and memorializes our collections; white men are still frequently situated in the narratives of collections as the authoritative voice. This singular joy of collecting means that there are specific parameters that have directed the growth of the collection. Collections must be necessarily bounded. We cannot collect everything; a robust collection development policy helps focus the collection and make it relevant. Yet these boundaries obscure silences: the way we have collected, and subsequently, the way we have catalogued, illuminate these genealogies of singular, white man’s joy. One field guide published by the Smithsonian betrayed one curator’s personal interests in throwing sticks, which had 8 sub-classifications of hand-held weaponry and only 2 for art.9 What a perfect example of singular joy directing a seemingly neutral process of classification. The emphasis on certain kinds of joy also provides a perverse prioritization of authority in collections with Indigenous materials. In museums, Indigenous items are frequently named not for their home communities or their makers, but by the donor, for example, “shields in collections that their records state ‘maker unknown’ but clearly articulate that it is part of the ‘Smith’ collection.”10 Nathan Sentance, a Wiradjuri museum 7  Glenbow Museum, “About our Founder,” About. https://www.glenbow.org/about/.. 8  Library of Congress. “Jefferson’s Library.” Thomas Jefferson. https://www.loc.gov/ exhibits/jefferson/jefflib.html. 9  Hannah Turner, “Decolonizing Ethnographic Documentation: A Critical History of the Early Museum Catalogs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 53, no. 5-6 (2015): 666. 10 Nathan Sentance, “Maker Unknown and the Decentring First Nations People,” para. 2. Archival Decolonist (blog). July 21, 2017. https://archivaldecolonist.com/2017/07/21/ maker-unknown-and-the-decentring-first-nations-people/. 5 Browndorf, Pappas, and Arays The Collector and the Collected theorist, highlights how this naming decenters Indigenous voices, and how it implies that Indigenous knowledge and culture: [D]oesn’t exist until it gets white acknowledgement. That our culture, like our land, needs to be ‘discovered.’ Furthermore, it does not recognise First Nations people as creators of culture and history or as knowledge holders, but rather gives them the roles of subjects.11 As Sentance remarks, the narratives of authority in Indigenous collections too often privilege the “discoverers” of Indigenous items, rather than the communities. In collecting, we privilege certain voices, certain items, certain knowledges. Those of us working in cultural memory institutions inherit these inaccurate systems with little control over their creation, and we build upon them; it is too easy to perpetuate these inaccuracies. When we see “maker unknown” on a piece of Indigenous art in a collection, it reminds us that most normative collecting is unconcerned with situated knowledges—knowledge that only makes sense within its contextual placement to the land where it emerges. Positioning Indigenous knowledges as placebased, situated knowledges refuses the concept of a singular Indigenous experience. While it is useful to draw on the experiences of communities across the world to illustrate the ways that settler-colonialism enacts theft, disregard, and exoticization on Indigenous groups in predictable patterns, understanding situated knowledges enables us to see the complexities in Indigenous worldviews. From a Cree perspective, land is the foundational relationship—all knowledge emerges from kinship with the territory. As Sylvia McAdams (Saysewahum) teaches, “nêhiyaw laws are in the songs, the ceremonies, and in all the sacred sites. The land is intertwined in a most profound manner, so to separate the two would mean death to many aspects of nêhiyaw culture.”12 Collection metadata offers, 11 Sentance, “Maker Unknown.” para. 2. 12 Sylvia McAdams (Saysewahum), Nationhood Interrupted: Revitalizing nêhiyaw Legal Systems, (Vancouver: Purich Publishing, 2015), 23. 6 Collections Are Our Relatives at best, a limited note of context to situated knowledge in its reference to the location of the collection or the publication. When I was at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York with my cousins from Tsuut’ina, we saw a beautiful coat from their nation, but laughed at the place where it had been collected: Saskatchewan. The Tsuut’ina reserve is not located in Saskatchewan, but in Alberta, the next province over. Despite being accurate about one of the processes of collecting (at some point, this coat exchanged hands in Saskatchewan), the way this item was described was not grounded by its situatedness within its home territory. Who has the authority to own and manage collections? If there is any authority, it is rarely considered to sit within Indigenous communities, despite thinkers like McAdams sharing the ways that Cree knowledge is situated in place.13 Indigenous peoples are all too familiar with the ways that their stories have been co-opted and packaged for other audiences. Métis researcher Adam Gaudry characterizes most research on Indigenous people as being grounded in extraction: “In this model, outsider academics conduct research on Indigenous peoples for the purpose of learning about certain aspects of their lives that they find personally interesting or intriguing or that may serve colonial processes (such as Western models of “healing” that reinforce Indigenous victimhood).”14 As educators who, in libraries, teach information literacy, many of us consider the way that authority is constructed and contextual,15but much of the research that populates our collections comes from this kind of extractive research, which “results in the marginalization and deauthorization of Indigenous voices on their culture and history.”16 Who gets the access to know about Indigenous information? Who is granted the credibility to disseminate this 13 McAdams, Nationhood Interrupted, 23. 14 Adam Gaudry, “Insurgent Research,” Wicazo Sa Review 26, no. 1 (2011): 114. 15 Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. 2015. http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework. 16 Gaudry, “Insurgent Research,” 119. 7 Browndorf, Pappas, and Arays The Collector and the Collected information? The late Narcisse Blood, when considering the rationale for museum collections, knew the defensiveness of museums when he asked who they were conserving and preserving the items for “if knowledge is the goal, then let’s talk about it. Because if you are just conserving and preserving the[se things] for the sake of preserving them, then knowledge gets sacrificed. There needs to be more of an interaction. There needs to be a relationship.”17 Indigenous communities have too often had restricted access to the information created about them and have been largely made absent from the process of dissemination of these knowledges. When we privilege the authority of the ethnographies written by non-Indigenous people, we silence the lived experiences of Indigenous people. Catawba writer Roo DeLesslin asserts: Remember that for many years, LYING was a way of surviving visits by anthropologists. The written record isn’t the be-all-end-all of indigenous history. One of the issues we have with the Catawba language revitalization project is that these linguists and anthropologists were often fed BS by our ancestors who were weary of these colonizers who wanted to extract more knowledge/resources from us.18 DeLesslin reminds us that ethnographic refusal is not ignorance: when a participant refuses to answer a question, they are enacting sovereignty over that information. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, in delineating ethnographic refusal as a research methodology, note that recognizing this process asks researchers to reciprocally refuse in solidarity as a necessary aspect 17 Laura Peers and Alison K Brown, Visiting with the Ancestors (Athabasca: Athabasca University Press, 2016), 76. 18 Roo DeLesslin (@DeLesslin), Twitter post, 12 Dec 2017. https://twitter.com/DeLesslin/ status/940659260509294593. 8 Collections Are Our Relatives of achieving decolonial research outcomes.19 When participants reject questions, they choose to restrict access because proper protocols, which create the context for a true expression of the information, have not been adhered to. Intellectual property always requires an appropriate context to have meaning, whether from an Indigenous perspective or not. Copyright, for example, is one framework to understand context and authority. The introduction to the book Indigenous Notions of Ownership and Libraries, Archives, and Museums reminds us, however, that copyright concepts are not neutral, but culturally situated: When results of research and writing are published the author holds the legal copyright to that knowledge or cultural expression. This is contrary to indigenous notions of copyright. Parallel to Western culture, indigenous peoples regarded unauthorized use of their cultural expressions as theft. Only in the proper cultural context with ownership from the originating people can the true expression of that cultural expression be found. 20 This tension between the lack of proper cultural context and the materials held in our collections demands that workers in cultural memory institutions evaluate their holdings. All intellectual property issues are defined by power structures: traditional Indigenous songs are generally not protected by Western copyright law because they are not considered original; copyright is often conferred through recording, a process that has largely been done by non-Indigenous researchers. 21 Indigenous peoples’ authority to protect their own cultural and intellectual property is limited within our systems of copyright. 19 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Unbecoming Claims: Pedagogies of Refusal in Qualitative Research,” Qualitative Inquiry 20, no. 6 (July 2014): 811–18. 20 Camille Callison, Loriene Roy, and Alice Lecheminant, “Preface,” in Indigenous Notions of Ownership and Libraries, Archives, and Museums (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2016), 1. 21 Allison Mills. “Learning to Listen, Archival Sound Recordings and Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property.” Archivaria 83 (Spring 2017): 109-124. 9 Browndorf, Pappas, and Arays The Collector and the Collected If we assess an Indigenous Studies collection in an academic library with this lens of proper cultural context, what kinds of stories are being presented in the absence of an appropriate authority? In Cree protocol, some stories are only told under certain conditions: stories about the trickster, for example, are only told when there is snow on the ground. If these stories have been collected and published in a book where access to that information has no seasonal restrictions, the authority has been misplaced in the recorder of those stories, rather than in the storytellers granted access based on the season, emerging from a relationship with the land. Allison Mills argues, “Archivists should not further the historic colonialism of ethnographic fieldwork by maintaining long-held hierarchies that privilege the work of academics over the concerns of the people whose songs and stories are recorded in the archive.”22 So then how can we, as workers in cultural memory institutions, give students tools to query authority in the resources they find if our collections replicate systems of inaccurate authority? If workers can assess the ways their collections lack the proper context for the “true expression”23 of that information, we might see more clearly the flaws and gaps in our collection development. We may also position ourselves differently toward our collections. Because Indigenous concepts of collections are less about the physical objects and more about being in relationship with these objects, these items are our relatives, whether they are origin stories held in a library collection or war shirts kept in a museum collection. Repatriation narratives illustrate the complex dynamics at play when collections contain relatives. The Blackfoot Shirts Project brought shirts in the care of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford temporarily home to Blackfoot territory. The process is outlined in the book Visiting with the Ancestors and a quote from Herman Yellow Old Woman, Naa too tsi ssi (Holy Smoker), a Blackfoot elder involved in the project, illuminates the gap between the way 22 Mills, “Learning to Listen,” 116. 23 Callison, Roy, and Lecheminant, Indigenous Notions, 1. 10 Collections Are Our Relatives Indigenous communities consider artifacts and the way museums do: “When we come here we pray, we talk to these things you call artifacts. To us they’re not artifacts. They’re live; it’s a living thing.”24 Some of the shirts included human hair: “the presence of hairlocks makes these three shirts sacred, and many Blackfoot and Blackfeet people today say that the spirits of the individuals from whom the hair was taken, as well as those who made and wore the shirts, are tied to the shirts themselves”25 The living nature of the items provided the Blackfoot community members guidance on how to direct the museum professionals to care for these shirts. But this perspective of seeing artifacts as living, while specifically Blackfoot in this example, is not exclusive to Blackfoot people. From a personal perspective, the first time I heard a recording of my late grandfather Gilbert Anderson playing fiddle after his death was a kind of visit from him. 26 When I look at the shape of the leaves and the technique of the flower beadwork of my late great-grandmother, Clara Loyer, née Cunningham, her family patterns connect me to the labor of women, to my ancestors’ creativity and ingenuity. Sherry Farrell Racette voices this same feeling while visiting with some Métis beadwork in museums: I had my first opportunity to sit with some very old things. I was awed by their age, but I was most struck by their familiarity…they are objects encoded with knowledge, although they are sometimes impenetrable and difficult to understand. Most often sleeping on a shelf in a museum storage room, completely decontextualized from their cultures of origin. 27 24 Peers and Brown, Visiting, 104. 25 Peers and Brown, Visiting, 59. 26 For music clips, see Folkways Alive, “Gilbert Anderson, Northern Alberta Métis Fiddler,” (2007). http://www.fwalive.ualberta.ca/vmctm/en/html/narratives.php?id=10&sec=0. 27 Farrell Racette, “Looking for Stories,” 285. 11 Browndorf, Pappas, and Arays The Collector and the Collected The familiarity felt in seeing these ancient objects is a recognition of genealogy. Indigenous people are tied to their communities intergenerationally; knowing genealogy means knowing that the ancestors’ things are relatives too. There is an ongoing responsibility that is animated in the present when we encounter these collections. For Indigenous people, encountering our relatives’ items in collections reminds us that they are not simply old things that once belonged to our ancestors, but that the items themselves are relatives. The collection is animate, and there is an emotional response to visiting our relatives. In the 2018 movie Black Panther, Erik Killmonger stands in the museum, telling the condescending curator that her information is wrong; these items are not from Benin, but Wakanda. His response to seeing these objects behind glass is anger. While he is the villain in a fictional movie, his rage at being kept from his relatives by glass is an appropriate response. The singular joy and the impulse of collecting so often has obscured the pain felt by communities who have experienced theft and lies as their relatives were taken from them to become part of collections. Wiradjuri poet Jeanine Leane’s poem “Cardboard Incarceration” names the harms done by the sterile ways that collections hold Indigenous knowledge: This cardboard prison they call an archive is cold, airless, and silent as death. Floor-to-ceiling boxes contain voices no longer heard but wailing within […] We are the inmates incarcerated within cardboard cells28 28 Jeanine Leane, “Cardboard Incarceration,” Australian Book Review. States of Poetry ACT–Series One. https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/poetry/states-of-poetry/ states-of-poetry-act/states/2971-states-of-poetry-act-cardboard-incarceration-byjeanine-leane. 12 Collections Are Our Relatives If we consider the items held in collections as our relatives, rage is one appropriate response to the way they have been forcibly removed from our communities. Communities have called for the repatriation of human remains as a way to reunite Indigenous communities with their relatives held in collections. But Indigenous communities have kinship ties to other kinds of collections, too, and are crying out for these relatives to come home. In order to even begin to address that rage and pain, those of us who work in cultural memory institutions must first build kinship with our collections and understand them as our relatives as well. For us to accept this theoretical and practical shift, I would like to suggest two frameworks that might help us be in relationship with our collections: Cree legal tradition, specifically the law of wâhkôhtowin, and an archival ethic of care that recenters the human. In a Cree legal tradition, wâhkôhtowin directs us to know our relatives. Individuals must understand how they are related to their relatives in order to understand their responsibility for them and their accountability to them. 29 Relatives are not simply family. Though wâhkôhtowin begins with the family, it networks out into understanding our kinship with creation beyond just human relatives. An item in a collection holds this genealogy, outlined in the way that Blackfoot elder Narcisse Blood talks about clothing made from hide. A war shirt: …talks about relationships, about the animal that was killed, the animal that we used for many other things, other than the shirt. It fed children; the bones were used for something else. And this particular animal was used for a shirt. And so you start thinking about the relationship to those animals. They gave us life in so many ways.”30 29 McAdams, Nationhood Interrupted, 22. 30 Peers and Brown, Visiting, 43. 13 Browndorf, Pappas, and Arays The Collector and the Collected Gratitude to those non-human relatives for their sustenance is part of the responsibility within wâhkôhtowin. Cree people are expected to know their relatives through wâhkôhtowin. As cultural memory institution staff, we must engage with the relationships that nurture our collection—the collection’s extended family. A collection contains relatives that may have lived in the past, those living in the present, and, within wâhkôhtowin, a responsibility to future generations. Blackfoot elder Herman Yellow Old Woman saw visiting these shirts as visiting with his ancestors: Our people, things from the past, way back, these shirts come from way back; I don’t know how many years, generations back. Those are people who had no knowledge of reading, no knowledge of what white people were, what the Bible was. No knowledge of that. They just knew how to be Blackfoot. That’s where those shirts came from. So that’s why to me, I was so, so moved, you know? Emotional I guess, that’s the proper—there was a connection from where my people were today. 31 His connection to the shirts was not an abstract sense of heritage, but an articulated kinship, one that enacts wâhkôhtowin. This Cree legal tradition intersects with archival theory that posits that we must understand the humans who move in and through our spaces and animate the records in our care, what Bethany Nowviskie calls recentering the human. When we tend to collections, particularly when considering digital repatriation, we have two options. We can …replicate colonial archival configurations and normative knowledge structures of the past. Or we can take it seriously and step back a bit, so that the people who rightly possess and articulate it may better direct us all—on 31 Peers and Brown, Visiting, 150. 14 Collections Are Our Relatives their own terms—in systems-building for digital stewardship and the work of memory institutions. 32 Nowviskie identifies that the authority for records in archives belongs to the communities who created those records rather than the donors who provided the items and the funding or the archivists who manage the collections. She sees that prioritizing a community’s authority is a way to address the legacies that all cultural memory institutions inherit. Where wâhkôhtowin directs us to be in relationship with the artifacts behind glass and in Hollinger boxes, this recentering of humans prompts us to connect those items with their living communities. It pushes our ethics into the present, avoiding traps of nostalgia or erasure of the past. The move to recenter these living relations in archives is in conversation with Caswell and Cifor’s ethic of care, which directs archivists to reconceptualize their work by seeing themselves in affective relationship with four categories of people who animate records: relationships between the archivist and the records creator, the archivist and the records subject, the archivist and the user, and the archivist and the larger community. 33 Being in relationship with your collection means being part of an extended family, a complex web of kinship networks. Even beginning to name these networks is a radical act of understanding material in collections as animated by relationality. Both the Cree law of wâhkôhtowin and archival theory that centers relationship provide us with tools to understand and listen to the rage and sadness of folks who encounter collections that have kept their relatives from them. Though we may have inherited collections that are largely structured around a singular white man’s joy, allowing reciprocity and relationality to structure our connections to collections 32 Bethany Nowviskie, “everywhere, every when,” Bethany Nowviskie (blog). 29 April 2016. http://nowviskie.org/2016/everywhere-every-when/. 33 Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics,” Archivaria 81 (Spring 2016): 33-41. 15 Browndorf, Pappas, and Arays The Collector and the Collected can disrupt and challenge this historic selfish impulse in collecting. Instead, if we consider how these materials and the stories that they contain can be reunited with their human relatives and communities, this process of family reunification actually allows the materials to be more generative, existing in communality, a repatriation that goes beyond the limits of NAGPRA. A gathering hosted by the Saskatchewan Indigenous Cultural Centre in 2019 was centered on building capacity for people working in museums, cultural centers, archives, interpretive centers, and libraries, particularly for Indigenous people working in their home communities. Their promotional materials considered sacred cultural items, oral histories, family cultural items, and items in museums, asking of them, “Are your ancestors waiting to come home?”34 When we consider repatriation of items as reuniting with their people, the original theft of these stories and material culture gets re-inscribed as a recognition of the ongoing survival of indigenous communities in a world that situates them in terms of erasure, of genocide, and as a footnote of the past. By connecting to our relatives in collections, I am interested in the past, present, and future of Indigeneity; I am interested in a timeline that is not a line at all. With this framework, the authority constructed by a collection does not sit with its so-called creator, but by the communities whose stories are contained in the collection, not only its ancestral communities, but its living relatives. By recognizing the violence that every collection contains and how it was shaped by and persists as the singular joy of a white man, those who work with collections can actually engage and empathize with the harm experienced by the communities who are poorly represented, silenced, or erased by this legacy. We can place ourselves in the practical space of considering an ethic of care by asking: Whom do our collections belong to, beyond a singular view of provenance, authority, and ownership? If materials are owned in communal networks, how then do those of us who work in cultural memory institutions understand our 34 SICC 2019, “2019 ē-micimināyakik Gathering,” YouTube Video, 6 March 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CY-fzrYylY 16 Collections Are Our Relatives relationship to them? Perhaps what we do can be understood as a temporary stewardship, fostering materials until their families can take them home. We have inherited these systems that privilege incorrect authority, so to do right by Indigenous communities whose relatives we hold, we will need to do outreach that shifts the balance of authority away from us as experts and toward the community members related to our collections. We have begun this process slowly with repatriating human remains and sacred items; what does this stewardship entail if we expand our thinking to consider library, archival, and museum collections as someone’s relatives? Despite our historical legacies of theft and silencing, libraries, archives, and museums are, at their best, aspirational worlds of possibility: no one individual could ever engage with all the material that our collections contain. To be able to hear the cadence of my late grandparents’ voices in the way an ethnomusicologist quoted them35 in her research years ago is such a gift; I miss them, and their words on a page have power. So, if we reconceptualize and pivot to a communal or a generational model of being in relationship with our collections, and be accountable to the people of past, present, and future who are associated with the collections, then our collections might shift from emerging from a singular, white man’s joy to expanding into a decolonial love letter to our kin. Bibliography Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. 2015 http://www.ala.org/acrl/ standards/ilframework. 35 See Sarah Quick’s work on old tyme Métis fiddling: Sarah Quick. “The Social Poetics of the Red River Jig in Alberta and Beyond: Meaningful Heritage and Emerging Performance,” Erudit. 30, no. 1. (2008) https://doi.org/10.7202/018836ar, and Sarah Quick. “Performing Heritage: Métis Music, Dance, and Identity in a Multicultural State” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2009). https://search.proquest.com/docview/304902818. 17 Browndorf, Pappas, and Arays The Collector and the Collected Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking my Library.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, translated by Harry Zohn, edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1968. Callison, Camille, et al.. “Preface.” Indigenous Notions of Ownership and Libraries, Archives, and Museums (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2016), 1. Caswell, Michele, and Marika Cifor. “Radical Empathy in the Archives.” Archivaria 81 (Spring 2016): 23-43. https://archivaria.ca/archivar/index. php/archivaria/article/view/13557/14916. DeLesslin, Roo (@DeLesslin), Twitter post, 12 Dec 2017. https://twitter.com/ DeLesslin/status/940659260509294593. 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