Work needed to include marginalized communities in historical record, expert says

A documentary film Unarchived that screened in Halifax on Friday examines the shortcomings of museums and archives in telling the history of marginalized communities and the importance of community archives. 

Sharon Murray, the archives adviser for the Council of Nova Scotia Archives, introduced the film. She said even though the film is based on the British Columbia experience, it points to a problem that is challenging archivists everywhere.

Murray told CBC Radio's Information Morning Nova Scotia that work is being done to correct the silencing of important historical voices.

Why does the film call for a revolution in archive and museum practices?

We're at a bit of a critical juncture in archival practice at the moment we're in.

We've recognized that generations of archivists before us made some decisions that silenced certain voices in history within our archives. And we recognize now that this is a significant problem and we are therefore now responsible to make changes, to try to ensure that these mistakes are not made going forward but, as much as possible, to help to repair the damage that's been done.

It's a challenge, of course, but I think one that most archives and archivists are up for, in as much as [they] feel that this is a really important thing for us to do and a way for us to continue to give back to our communities.

A couple of prongs to the revolution would be who are the archivists and what's considered valuable to be preserved, whether it's documents or papers or other kinds of markers of history and stories?

This speaks to some of the fundamentals of archives in that the profession, at least historically, was very much dominated by white settlers, mostly male.

That has shifted somewhat in the more recent years, but they were the ones making a lot of the decisions about what was considered valuable and therefore worth keeping and what got disposed of.

And certainly the entire profession is founded on preserving mostly paper based records. But as I think we all know, that is not the only way in which stories and histories are kept. Oral traditions, recorded oral histories, visual media — there are lots of other ways in which history is captured and people leave paper trails of their lives.

If archives are fixated only on this one medium, then it does create these massive gaps in the story.

This film, Unarchived,  looks at how community archives are stepping up to address some of the gaps that you mentioned. What's a local example of what's lost when a story is left out or maybe what's gained when a community gets involved and also what's considered an archive is rethought to include oral histories or journals, video, audio, all of that?

We don't unfortunately have as many examples here in Nova Scotia as B.C. does. The film puts a spotlight on some wonderful archives and initiatives there, both within immigrant communities, Indigenous communities, LGBTQ2S plus communities.

Here we have a bit further to go, but there are certainly some examples of important people and organizations doing work to try to find what fragments and stories do remain.

For instance, there is an LGBTQ seniors archive that's housed at the Dalhousie University archives.

This is a project, a sort of a grassroots project,  that came out of the LGBTQ community itself. It's not a standalone institution, but certainly it does contribute to trying to correct  the narrative of our history.

In that way, there's the Africville Museum, the Black Cultural Centre — the Black Loyalist Heritage Centre also have materials that fill in a lot of the gaps about the African Nova Scotian presence in HRM and the province. All of them are contributing and really doing significant and important work.

Where we don't see as much movement sadly, and I will say tragically, as yet is in the Mi'kmaw community, although the Mi'kmaw Native Friendship Centre here in Halifax has established an archive with Dr. Trudy Sables, a collection of research notes and oral history testimonies and interviews with Mi'kmaq.

And from that the idea is that those interviews can be given back to the community and they can reclaim some of that knowledge.

Within settler archives the Nova Scotia Archives digitized the Peace and Friendship Treaty as a way of sort of repatriating that knowledge as well.

There's effort, but there is a long way to go.

Why do you want people to see this film and maybe think about how they can be part of community archiving in a different way?

One of the things I really love about the film is that it demonstrates the problem in archives today, but also the power and the potential that they have to empower people and to give them control over their own family and community narratives.

To give them access to the pieces of their history and the sort of importance of that to helping enact change.

There's this wonderful line in the film where someone says finding something in an archive that connects to your past is like a gift from history.

For more stories about the experiences of Black Canadians — from anti-Black racism to success stories within the Black community — check out Being Black in Canada, a CBC project Black Canadians can be proud of. You can read more stories here.