Native American & Indigenous Languages (NAIL) Lab

Join us for the NAIL Lab's inaugural talk and workshop of the "Visiting with and alongside Indigenous Language Workers: Conversations on Ethics and Praxis in Language Work" series. 

 

 

 

Materials are said to be in cold storage when they are placed where they can be stabilized and cared for long-term. These places are generally not easily accessible, but guarantee accessibility over a longer span of time and contexts. Cold storage is a promise of longevity, and a reference to disembodiment.

Cold storage is necessary, and core part of memory care as it makes room for things in the moment. This talk and workshop is considering those things. Warm Storage is a 90-minute lecture and 90-minute workshop focused on community memory in this moment. It aims to provide stories and references to support the transfer, care, and storage of community memory within the current day’s constraints, technology, and needs.

 

Grassroots archives begin often without knowing they are archives. They are created to collect and communicate memory beyond the bounds of temporal human sharing. This lecture takes the form of a story and shall share stories of the Houma Language project community archiving practice as an experience from the ad hoc edge of archival practices from the perspective of relational accountable research theories. It will present a personal, candid narrative of entering the archival field while tracing encounters to expand on significant and ongoing complications within the relationship between community-based cultural heritage cohorts and research missions and outcomes.

The goal of the lecture is to present one path through the landscape, and open a discussion of how better paths can be forged by the audience in the future. The audience will leave with a personal example of a community-archive project, an ability to articulate how academic research impacts the work of community-based groups, and an opportunity to consider their agency as students in forming research processes.

 

This workshop asks students to build and discuss their own processes around community archiving topics. The focus are the entry and exit points of community memory - when material is accessioned or documented from the community into the collection, and the process of moving materials out of the collection and into the community. The workshop presents examples of these movements, elucidates further the complications of how these transfers are modeled differently across procedural and relational perspectives, facilitates discussion and personal digestion of these complexities, and provides templates for participants to revise for their own research or community use. Lunch will be provided. Please register here. 

 

Events are free and open to the public. 

 

Sponsors: Humanities Research Institute, Siebal Center for Design, American Indian Studies Program, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Access, Civil Rights & Community, Student Affairs