Collections Are Our Relatives Disrupting the Singular, White Man’s Joy That Shaped Collections

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.