Proposing a Holistic Approach

 

“For a long time, activists did not necessarily think that it mattered to take care of themselves in terms of what they eat, in terms of mental self-care, corporal self-care, and spiritual self-care...what mattered was the movement and that hurt a lot of us.”

-Angela Davis, On Radical Self-Care via Afropunk

In the chapter, “Praxis for the People: Critical Race Theory and Archival Practice” Rachel Winston writes about the reality of being a Black woman archivist. She writes, “I find myself fewer than five Black professional staff and the sole Black archivist in an entire library system at one of the largest universities in the country.”^[1] What brings her to this role and what keeps her persisting through the difficulties she faces as an archivist is her identity as a Black woman. Winston rightly names the “twofold”^[2] nature of whiteness in the archive. She writes about the first, “I feel its oppressive presence when I walk into the library building and when I walk into the archival stacks.”^[3] As well as, the inability to “turn away or disengage”^[4] with historical trauma of records. Winston uses Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a critical framework to determine archival praxis that, “create space for racially and nonracially marginalized voices to be elevated.”^[5] She also names Black feminism (BF) as another important critical theory of future archival praxis because of the ethic of caring centering the notion that ideas cannot de divorced from the individuals who create and share them.

            While I agree that CRT and BF have been essential critiques of power, economy, and white supremacy in relation to marginalizing oppression, I argue that neither address the significance or perspective of being a Black woman. These ideologies support and uplift the cause of undoing Black women’s oppression in context of “anti-capitalist praxis”^[6] and “acknowledging the inherent politics of our work and the false pretense of archival neutrality.”^[7] They speak mostly to the nonblack woman outsider. I argue that the inclusion of womanism in critical discourse along with CRT and Black feminism will create a holistic approach that help archivists find wholeness. Incorporating womanist methods along with CRT and BF, archivists may craft the space within themselves to find embodiment and a sense of self while encountering whiteness working in the archive.

CRT uncovers to the “bloody”^[8] roots of the institutions like the archive. Black feminism challenges systems rooted in “economic exploitation, white privilege, and power.”^[9]  It resists all too often misrepresentations of Black women that influence law and policy. Womanism, a close cousin of Black feminism points Black women archivists (or any Black women who proclaim their life and witness) back to herself.  In this way, doing womanism alongside Black feminism and CRT is practicing radical soul-care while physically encountering records of terror and joy and working with microagressive coworkers.

The line of womanism I am referring to is sourced from several writings by Alice Walker in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She makes the claim that “a womanist is aware of her own value.”^[10] From this cultural center, Blackness is implicit. There is no need to preface it with “Black” as in Black feminism because the primary knowledge source is Black women’s intersectional experience. This concept comes from the legacy of honoring Black women’s life and witness.

Winston writes that she wants her work to be “an act of counternarrative by challenging the normalization of erasure.”^[11] That task should no longer be completed with CRT and Black feminist framework alone. Partnering with methods from womanism, such as womanist counternarrative, by Emilie M. Townes offers that history can be told differently and language that emerges by centering the Black gaze is knowledge^[12]. CRT and Black feminism work with the tendency for institutions and their representative to “forget”^[13] the truth about racism and make circular requests for education. Townes writes, “it is not healthy–not even for the dominant elite–to fail to remember the textures of our common humanity…it is strategic in that to ‘forget’ is to be able to feign ignorance and lack of agency.”^[14] CRT and Black feminism push Black archivists to serve in roles where they are subjected to isolation, gaslighting, and justifying to their colleague and audiences why the source of their/our anger and joy matters, as Winston describes.

Womanist methods push the caring approach beyond “simply acknowledging the labor of archivist processing and working with challenging or difficult material.”^[15] it suggests that Black women’s labor should no longer be sacrificial,^[16] rather it can exist to build the substance of Black women’s particularity.^[17] I propose that the inclusion of womanism when seeking an archival praxis with CRT and Black feminism creates a holistic approach. Womanism affirms ethics, language and Spirit that challenge metaphysical notions of ageism, sexism, classism, colorism, homophobia, racism, and more.^[18] Womanist praxis centers the complex experience of being and gifts Black women a chance at wholeness.

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^[1] Rachel E. Winston, “Praxis for the People: Critical Race Theory and Archival Practice,” in Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory (Cambridge: MIT, 2021).

^[2] Winston.

^[3] Winston.

^[4] Rachel E. Winston, “Praxis for the People: Critical Race Theory and Archival Practice,” in Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory (Cambridge: MIT, 2021), 284.

^[5] Winston.

^[6] Rose M. Brewer, “Black Feminism and Womanism,” in Companion to Feminist Studies, ed. Nancy A. Naples, First Edition (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2021), 91–104.

^[7] Winston, “Praxis for the People: Critical Race Theory and Archival Practice.”

^[8] Jarrett Martin Drake, “Blood at the Root,” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 8, no. 6 (2021): 1–23.

^[9]  Winston, “Praxis for the People: Critical Race Theory and Archival Practice.”

^[10] Brewer, “Black Feminism and Womanism.”

^[11] Winston, “Praxis for the People: Critical Race Theory and Archival Practice.”

^[12] Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

^[13] Townes.

^[14] Townes.

^[15] Winston, “Praxis for the People: Critical Race Theory and Archival Practice.”

^[16] Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil.

^[17] Townes.

^[18] Townes.

The Settled Library – Settler Colonialism in Library Settings, by Steenalisa Tilcock

            As a library user who is now progressing toward a career in librarianship, I am beginning to realize just how much I have taken the internal structure of the library for granted. However, like other forms of public space, everything in the library has been influenced and produced by dominant settler colonialist ideologies, which prevents them from fully serving indigenous users. Inspired by Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s critical inspection of research methodology[1], in this blog post I will examine the classification systems, organizational schemes, and conceptions of legitimate knowledge used by libraries in order to address their settler colonialist ties. I will also attempt to imagine how alternatives suggested by indigenous scholars can apply to a library setting.

The organization of library materials is not a neutral matter, but reflects the epistemology and values of a settler colonial society. Littletree and Metoyer discuss this in detail in their article “Knowledge Organization from an Indigenous Perspective,” which enumerates the ways in which standard cataloguing practices, guided by the Library of Congress, privilege non-indigenous language and concepts.[2] Littletree & Metoyer cite examples from a museum setting, but these concepts are very relevant in libraries as well. They state, “Scholars and librarians have indicated that the cataloging language silences Native American history. It disregards the sovereignty of Native nations, as well as historicizes and stereotypes Native people and cultures.”[3]  This misuse of language not only misrepresents indigenous concepts, twisting them and distorting them in order to fit into a settler context, but it also makes it difficult for indigenous users to locate material about their own cultures within libraries, privileging the settler user’s access to information about indigenous peoples. Subject headings beyond indigenous subjects prioritize settler perspectives: everything in the library, from fiction to cookbooks to history, is classified based on settler colonialist ideology. As such, indigenous users in libraries are forced to apply settler concepts to their own searches for information.

Out of curiosity, I conducted some brief searches in the Library of Congress subject headings database. A glance at the subject headings for the term “Spirituality,” for example, reveals that there are a plethora of options for spirituality related to organized religious practice, especially predominately Western religions.[4]  The entry for the generic term states, “Here are entered works about the personal search for sacredness or meaning that may be independent from organized religion.”[5]  None of these options seem to be applicable in an indigenous context, in light of Littletree and Metoyer’s statement that “Spirituality is an all-encompassing presence throughout one’s life.”[6] I also searched for the term “Miwok,” the tribe on whose unceded territory I grew up. I clicked on the entry for “Miwok Mythology,” and under this heading, three works from the LOC database were listed. As far as I was able to ascertain, all three of them were written by white authors—an anthropologist, an ornithologist, and a British author.[7] None of them, notably, were Miwok themselves.

Although this is only a small sample of the LOC subject headings, it harkens to the large body of research that Tuhiwai Smith discusses which was by settlers about indigenous peoples.[8] This research was conducted without understanding of the social and epistemological structures of indigenous societies and tends to generalize settler concepts onto indigenous social structures.[9] Much of this work is not only inaccurate, but in service of settler dominance. Tuhiwai Smith, for example, cites research about Maori women which completely misplaces them, comparing their role to that of Victorian women in the “domestic sphere.”[10] However, as Tuhiwai Smtih states, “Indigenous women would argue that their traditional roles included full participation in many aspects of political decision making and marked gender separations which were complementary in order to maintain harmony and stability.”[11] Even though the experiences of Maori women directly contradicts what has been written about them, the settler body of research carries a legitimacy granted to it by settler epistemological prioritization of written work and the structures of academia, while Maori women’s stories are granted no such value.[12]

When works like these become available through libraries, they contribute to the perpetuation of harmful conceptions of indigenous peoples. Of course, libraries also contain works by indigenous peoples about themselves. The trouble is that when patrons enter a library looking for materials about indigenous peoples, it’s not always obvious who it was written by and what methods or motivations were employed. Does the author belong to or have a close relationship with the peoples they wrote about? What were their motivations? How does their personal position problematize their story? Placing works by indigenous peoples and by settlers in the same categories and shelf locations obscures the answers to these questions and affords them the same level of legitimacy, ignoring the epistemological biases of settler authors. In this way, academia’s privileging of “scholarly” settler works about indigenous peoples over their own knowledge about themselves[13] also presents itself in the library.

Libraries can take an active role in the “unsettling,” to use Tuck and Yang’s word,[14] of each of these structures, which would allow them to better serve indigenous patrons. For example, they could take cue from The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology Project and use subject headings informed or wholly created by indigenous people when it comes to both indigenous and non-indigenous subjects.[15] This approach could help libraries distinguish texts created by indigenous people and harmful texts created by settler researchers—by including information about the origin of the text from an indigenous perspective in catalogue metadata, libraries may be better able to epistemologically separate them. Libraries could also think about the kinds of relationships between texts when they place them physically near each other on shelves. What kinds of epistemological biases are reflected in the current placements, and how can they rearranged to reflect indigenous ways of thinking and knowing? Can libraries re-examine current systems like Dewey and utilize other kinds of connections between materials, like genealogical ones? Grappling with questions like these may help libraries deconstruct their colonial biases and provide better information access to indigenous users.

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[1] Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 3rd ed. (Zed Books, 2001).

[2] Littletree and Metoyer, “Knowledge Organization from an Indigenous Perspective: The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology Project,.”

[3] Littletree and Metoyer.

[4] Congress, “- LC Linked Data Service.”

[5] Congress, “Spirituality - LC Linked Data Service.”

[6] Littletree and Metoyer, “Knowledge Organization from an Indigenous Perspective: The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology Project,.”

[7] Congress, “Miwok Mythology - LC Linked Data Service.”

[8] Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies.

[9] Tuhiwai Smith.

[10] Tuhiwai Smith.

[11] Tuhiwai Smith, 153.

[12] Tuhiwai Smith.

[13] Tuhiwai Smith.

[14] Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.”

[15] Littletree and Metoyer, “Knowledge Organization from an Indigenous Perspective: The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology Project,.”

Bibliography

 

Congress, The Library of. “- LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies | Library of Congress, from LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies (Library of Congress).” Webpage. Accessed January 30, 2022. https://id.loc.gov/search/?q=memberOf:http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/collection_LCSHAuthorizedHeadings.

 

Congress, The Library of. “Miwok Mythology - LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies | Library of Congress, from LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies (Library of Congress).” Webpage. Accessed February 6, 2022. https://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh94000795.html.

 

Congress, The Library of. “Spirituality - LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies | Library of Congress, from LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies (Library of Congress).” Webpage. Accessed January 30, 2022. https://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85126779.html.

 

Littletree, Sandra, and Cheryl A. Metoyer. “Knowledge Organization from an Indigenous Perspective: The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology Project,.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 53, no. 5–6 (July 31, 2015): 640–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2015.1010113.

 

Tuck, Eve, and K Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

 

Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies. 3rd ed. Zed Books, 2001.

 

Politics of Other(ing): 'Remembering' and 'Forgetting' the Indigenous | Arpit Gaind

In 2019, during a webinar on Decolonization, Eve Tuck remarked that if she had to write "Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor," - her seminal essay with co-author K. Wayne Yang - she may decide to change its title to "Decolonization Is Not Only a Metaphor." (cited in Post 45, July 2021). The reason for this, she said, is the realization of how "metaphors are actually really important to how we understand and describe colonialism and decolonization."(YouTube, May 9, 2019). This makes one think and examine the reinforcement (often contradictions too) and incommensurability produced by colonialism and capitalism?

Though Tuck and Yang's concern for how Decolonization operates in the context of the Americas, it’s a striking relevance to its operationalization in the Southeast Asian context, particularly India, and the latter’s relationship with the indigenous communities - historically shaped by colonization itself. Like in the context of the US, in India too, the Indigenous question has been left to the academy and corporate culture, meaning vaguely little more than its in intellectual conversation, and designing syllabuses for the classroom. As Tuck explained, "when it is used only as a figure of speech, decolonization as a discourse recenters whiteness, resettles theory that is yearning to break the mold, extends innocence to settlers, and entertains a settler future."(Post 45, July 2021).1

Tuck and Yang’s theorization helps articulate the question of Indigeneity in India’s context and the use of media to frame these communities in terms of being outside to the idea of “Modern-Urban India.” If one looks at the disruption caused in the ways of living of Adivasi2 (indigenous) communities in India, its operationalization in the context of their cultural representation is historically a complicated one. This paves the way to critically understand what constitutes the indigenous ‘subject’ in relation to both past and contemporary practices engaged in ‘capturing’ them, thus informing notions of time and memory. Tuck and Yang argue how “settler-colonization” is not the same as another colonization in understanding the specificity of Decolonization as a process of reparation. In this colonization, settlers come intending to make a new home. The land is remade into the property, and human relationships to land are restricted to the owner's relationship to their property. Externally, all things natural that are critical to the life-world of indigenous communities became commodities; internally, settlers “manage” all people and “resources” within structures bio- and geo-politically.

The authors discuss six strategies or positioning the settlers (not necessarily white) use to absorb Decolonization into narratives that, based on the colonial framework, are “settler move to innocence” (Tuck and Yang, 2012, 3). And they argue that these are attempts to “relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege.” Tuck and Yang leave a narrow path to follow, unyielding to any but one direction in conceptualizing Decolonization. I find myself intrigued yet unsettled. However, what is discomforting for me is Tuck and Yang’s version of Decolonization and raises immediate questions: What will this even look like? Tuck and Yang reject Freire’s notion of liberating the oppressed and the oppressor3. While they are conscious that Decolonization itself can reproduce the indigenous-settler-slave triad and reject the simple shuffling of who occupies which role, it is unclear how turning the clock back by hundreds of years will not reproduce a new class of the oppressed? 

The Indigenous Other and the project of Development

Drawing upon ideas of Tuck & Yang’s work on Decolonization and Nancy Godoy’s work on archives provides us a great canon to empirically examine the role they play in governance and the representation of the ‘primitive’ in both the colonial and the post-colonial contexts. The conceptualization of the “uncivilized” Indigenous Other directly affects how we understand the primitive and how they are rationalized ideologically4as a subject. In the Indian context, for instance, ‘Primitive’ becomes a temporal category without any analytical value, and unchanging primitive culture – even though spatially distant as we saw – could still be known and studied (Fabian, p. 18). This Johannes Fabian calls “writing history without time, of people without history” (ibid). 

In this logic - as Nancy Liliana Godoy (2021) rightly critiques - the traditional notion of the archive is a project of knowing the object could be accomplished through fieldwork. Moreover, with the typological classifications of time Modern/Literate, Rural/Urban, Hot, and cold societies, the qualitative inscription of societies reached its completion. The ‘primitive savage’ thus was not yet ready for civilization and needed an external force, assistance to civilize and progress, paving the way for both – first, colonization and industrialization and second, development. The latter was a product of the post-1950s world of Decolonization, where the modern post-colonial state in the way that we see today was geared towards unhinging capitalist modernity. In fact, the efforts at decolonization post World War II in the 1950s and 1960s defined how the project of Modernity and its natural by-product, Industrial Development, came to take place in post-colonial societies like India. This framing of Development created a typological split of a kind Fabian also refers to in his analysis – the categories of the Rural versus Urban, Modern versus Pre-Modern, the Forest versus the City Dweller. It means that the same logic of ‘Archived Other’ was applied within the frame of the nation itself, relocating the Adivasi to the category of pre-modern, a ‘living dead,’ who didn’t serve many purposes to either the project of nationalism and later to that of the modern nation (Chakrabarti and Dhar, 2009). 

In line with Godoy, Prathama Banerjee argues how in the backdrop of colonization, 18th century onwards, the idea of nationalism in India made the Adivasi subject the left-over of the nation and in constant subtraction to the capitalist modernity (Banerjee, 2006). The disruption caused by this in the ways of being and living of Adivasi communities in Central-Eastern India by their typologizing as Developed versus under-Developed and Urban-Modern India versus Rural India. Banerjee argues that the question of Adivasi culture is tied to the critical evaluation of notions of Progress and Development which leads to dual othering of the Adivasi subject – first, as the ‘primitive other’ at the hands of the colonizer, and second, as the ‘pre-modern other’ at the hands of the post-colonial nation. The fundamental paradigm under which the idea of Progress and Development has worked is a teleological understanding of the world, reducing the indigenous to the pre-modern and unknown objects of analysis. These objects can then be ‘archived at will’ and recorded at convenience – first by the colonizer and then by the modern developing nation-state.

Community archives as self-healing 

To think about this question is articulate the role community-driven archives play in articulating themes of self-healing and self-creation (Godoy, 2021) and in the community’s coping mechanism. Godoy’s work challenges the ideas that view archives as a neutral site of production and Indigenous people as exotic objects. By appraising the way Nancy Godoy does, letting the Indigenous self-create their narratives and want to represent themselves allows us to explore the archive as a site of ‘positive’ cultural production. This site could provide both the analytical framework and the substance needed to comprehend the larger question of culture. Flinn, Stevens, and Shepherd (2009, p. 75) argue that community archives are a way to counter the already existing stereotypes and misrepresentations of history and lives by mainstream media and popular culture. 

By imagining archives as a place for dialogue and production rather than just preservation, Godoy marks an essential departure from the role archive plays in preserving history from the outside. Similarly, Michelle Caswell’s (2016) argues about the significance of community archives while drawing upon a feminist critique of “symbolic annihilation” from the 1970s to “describe the absence, under-representation, maligning and trivialization” of marginalized voices impacting the meta-historical narratives around them (Caswell et al., p. 4).  

Works Cited

Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization 1:1 (2012), http://www.decolonization.org/index.php/des/article/view/18630. 

Nancy Liliana Godoy, “Community-Driven Archives: Conocimiento, Healing, and Justice,” Journal of Critical LIS 3 (2021): https://journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jclis/article/view/136. 

“Beyond the Trend of Decolonizing Science,” Webinar, Union of Concerned Scientists https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/beyond-trend-decolonizing-science 

Johannes Fabian, ‘Time and the Emerging Other’; in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. (2014 [1983]). New York: Columbia University Press. 

Scott Challener. “Introduction: ‘Not Only a Metaphor’” from Decolonize X, Post 45. (July 30, 2021). https://post45.org/2021/07/introduction-not-only-a-metaphor/  

End Notes

[1] Tuck here rehearses several key claims of her co-authored essay, which appeared in the inaugural issue of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. See Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, "Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor," Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1-40.

[2] In Hindi vernacular Adivasi means “Original Inhabitants” where Adi means beginning or first and vasi means dweller. It is also a term used in collective reference to indigenous people in some parts Indian subcontinent – mostly the central and eastern belt of India. Henceforth, I will be using “Adivasi” in reference to the indigenous communities in India. However, Adivasi is not the only linguistic referent when it comes to indigenous groups in India (there are others too) and I use Adivasi in the context of the specific historical location my research is working under.

[3] Paulo Freire in his seminal text Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2000) argues at length how any kind of social and political transformation is elusive till there is no change in the psyche of the subject position of the oppressor. In Freire’s thesis, the Oppressor needs to play an important role in the whole act of liberation of the oppressed, otherwise, the cycle will continue, and every revolutionary act will follow a new cycle of oppression.  For Tuck and Yang though, Freire’s argument is part of the same problem of “mutuality based on sympathy and suffering”. 

[4] Louis Althusser in his 1971 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation)” unpacks in detail the role of ideology in subject formation (in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays). Even though outside the scope of this essay, Althusser’s theorization plays an important role in understanding how the subject gets rationalized within the fold of the nation-state.  

Papers More Precious than Blood: Identity Documents & Sousveillance in Chinese American Communities | Kai Nham

I remember standing at the Angel Island Immigration Center in the San Francisco Bay, listening to poems that had been etched into the walls of the station in my mother tongue and being moved to tears. The heaviness of the history of the detention center weighed on me. The migrants at Angel Island, who were predominantly Chinese, were often detained for weeks and subject to intense scrutiny and interrogation around their identity and authorization to enter the United States. Rising anti-Chinese sentiment and exclusion laws led to the increasing importance of identity documentation for Chinese migrants and their families. As author Fae Myenne Ng wrote in her book Bone: “In this country, paper is more precious than blood.”¹ I posit that identity documentation is a core part of what Simone Browne calls racializing surveillance through the case study of Chinese exclusion laws and immigration practices from 1882 to 1943 and yet also served as a site of sousveillance for Chinese communities. 

Browne defines racializing surveillance as “when enactments of surveillance reify boundaries along racial lines, thereby reifying race, and where the outcome of this is often discriminatory and violent treatment.”²  With the enactment of the Chinese Restriction Act (1882), the Chinese Exclusion Act (1888), and the Geary Act (1892), the United States federal government began demanding documentary evidence that Chinese migrants had the right to enter the country, generating a frenzy of administrative document keeping in an attempt to delineate between “alien” and “citizen.”³ Thus, the massive boon in identity documentation for tracking the births, marriages, and deaths as well as the movements of the Chinese community were clear acts of surveillance by the government in an attempt to control migration along explicitly racial lines. Moreover, even in the presence of documentation, migrants were subjected to notoriously intense interrogations, ranging from details about family to the layout of their village of origin.

However, this racializing surveillance was not without resistance. Dark sousveillance, as defined by Browne, is “a way to situate the tactics employed to render one’s self out of sight, and strategies used in the flight to freedom from slavery as necessarily ones of undersight.”⁴Mindful that this definition was conceived in the specific context of Blackness and slavery, I propose that Chinese migrants engaged in different but resonant form of resistance and sousveillance in light of racist immigration restrictions and everyday state violence. In order to migrate, many of the Chinese migrants obtained fake documentation to enter the United States, becoming part of a community of “paper sons” and “paper daughters.” That is, “the unauthorized Chinese who wished to appear legal donned “a choice of masks,” assuming the identity of a returning laborer, exempted merchant, minor child of a merchant, or unmarried child of a citizen.”⁵This often meant extensively studying and memorizing the details of their new life – their paper name, their paper mother’s name, etc. – but even more prominently, served as a the birth of a dual identity through the act of deception.

Paper sons and daughters became a source of collective identity and community. While living in threat of violence and deportation, those who were positioned in such precarity developed a strong sense of community and kinship to help navigate their life in the United States. Often, community members would know both a given person’s “real” name or identity as well as the one listed on their documents, but this proved to be tricky in navigating the world outside of the Chinese community. Constant negotiation of risks were being calculated carefully. Moreover, these identities remained mostly stable and shouldered for lifetimes, reshaping and redefining what family meant in Chinese American communities.⁶Lives of paper families were intertwined intimately; the circumstances created webs of community based on interdependence and mutual aid.

As I think back to my trip to Angel Island, I continue to be moved by the resilience of my ancestors and elders throughout history. I draw on their stories of community and mutual aid as inspiration of how we can create deeply interdependent and interwoven communities of care today, especially in the rise of surveillance across different facets of our lives. As organizer and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs once said, “We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other.”⁷

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1 Fae Myenne Ng, Bone (Hachette Books, 2015).^↩
2 Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke University Press, 2015), 8.^↩
3 Beth Lew-Williams, “Paper Lives of Chinese Migrants and the History of the Undocumented,” Modern American History 4, no. 2 (July 2021): 109–30, https://doi.org/10.1017/mah.2021.9.^↩
4 Browne, Dark Matters, 21.^↩
5 Lew-Williams, “Paper Lives of Chinese Migrants and the History of the Undocumented.”^↩
6 Lew-Williams, “Paper Lives of Chinese Migrants and the History of the Undocumented.”^↩
7 Grace Lee Boggs and Scott Kurashige, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2011).^↩

Night at Whose Museum? Settler Colonial Fantasy in Night at the Museum | Estelle Yim

Oh, that’s problematic.
–Theodore Roosevelt, Night at the Museum (2006)        

    In “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” Eve Tuck and K.W. Yang describe settler adoption fantasies as those stories “in the settler colonial imagination in which the Native (understanding that he is becoming extinct) hands over his land, his claim to the land, his very Indian-ness to the settler for safe-keeping.”[1] These are the stories told by the colonizer which allow them to absorb Indigenous culture, knowledge, and peoples without needing or wanting to actually understand and humanize Indigenous people. They reference the film analysis conducted by Sara Ahmed as an example of a fantasy in which the story serves to “confirm the white man’s position as hero of the story.”[2] Here, I locate another colonial fiction in the 2006 movie Night at the Museum, which follows the story of the night guard Larry Daley at the Museum of Natural History in New York City who stumbles upon an entire society of artifacts that come to life at night. I aim to draw attention to what kinds of harmful narratives can arise when museums place Indigenous artifacts in adjacent and marginal spaces to dominant and centered colonial collections. By focusing on the film’s unrealistic story of colonial love between a US president and an Indigenous woman, I argue that a harrowing settler adoption fantasy came to life in this fictional museum because of how the colonizer and the colonized were forced together without any acknowledgement of the inherent violence in doing so.

    Museums, with their maze-like floors, seemingly endless displays, and frustratingly early closing hours beg their visitors to wonder what could possibly happen in them when nobody is around. The movie Night at the Museum realizes this fantasy, but to problematic ends, indeed. In the film, Sacagawea is quite literally on the brink of extinction along with the rest of the museum that is about to lose the artifact that grants them life. More important to the introduction of the settler fantasy, however, is that in the beginning of the movie, we see her confined – obediently accompanying Lewis and Clark  – behind a glass wall where she cannot even be heard (the main character wonders, “was she deaf?... because she does seem a little bit sort of unresponsive”).[3] This barrier, simultaneously transparent and impermeable, renders the value of her existence to its visibility, to the voyeuristic invitation to observe (and maybe, even, to know) her without any concern that her actual voice might interrupt whatever projection anyone can envision and subject her to. 

    This is made clear by the way Theodore Roosevelt – whose wax figure, with sword held high, sits astride a rearing horse in the direction of, presumably, the American empire’s stolen lands as well as the new lands he hopes to conquer – moves freely about the museum but chooses to spend every night spying through the glass pane with his binoculars, pining for Sacagawea and watching (over) her from his paternalistic, fetishizistic, and white saviorist – and importantly, distanced – gaze. After “sacrificing” his “life” to save her, the heroic “Teddy” is able to articulate his feelings for Sacagawea: “you’re worth saving, my dear.”[4] This cements the unsettling depiction of romance between the man who led several militant colonial escapades and the woman who was one of two enslaved Shoshone women bought to be wives to the French Canadian trader, Touissant Charbonneau.[5] By the end of the story, Sacagawea has used her skills to repair Roosevelt’s wounds. And because they are unfatal, given that he is made of wax, this interaction, too, highlights the unique eery immortality of his night form; although all other human depictions in the museum, including Sacagawea, are susceptible to fatal wounds and death, Roosevelt embodies the eternal life that is granted to the colonial project and its leaders. 

    Night at the Museum’s Sacagawea indeed gives up her whole self to the settler colonial fantasy in accepting and claiming her place in the tribal display in the museum. In ceding this home to the museum institution, curators, visitors, and their voyeurism and in voluntarily giving her life stories to them (“what do you want to know?”),[6] she places trust for her “safe-keeping” in a settler institution. Her place in the museum as a passive display cements the specific narrative of American history that relegates Indigenous existence to the past, to the controlled, and to the necessary prelude of the grand project of colonization. Although she joins the efforts against the predatory practices of museums to freely move, own, and hide or display artifacts, the museum/movie never really gives her a backstory or addresses the historical revisionism that has made her a girlboss of manifest destiny, who bravely paved the path across North America for colonial settlers in need her assistance. She takes up the same role in the movie by acting as Daley’s guide through the museum’s night life and helping him track down the movie’s antagonists, making possible his righteous quest to protect the territory that is where the museum’s nighttime society has settled. 

    The innocent love that drives Roosevelt to be Sacagawea’s hero is rooted in the Western distortion of romantic relationships as separate from the power dynamics that exist between individuals. What makes this relationship possible in the movie’s museum is his ability to watch her day and night to imagine and, eventually, realize his personal fantasy of conquering her through love. This love is indeed a colonial love, a fundamental contradiction to decolonial love, which is one that “highlights the importance of love as a counter to colonial violence and hatred of Indigenous peoples.”[7] Importantly, it is the positioning of the settler colonial fantasy with the settler colonial reality that allowed for such a one-sided love to burgeon. In practice, this is not dissimilar to how a museum visitor’s interaction with displays is about being the sole agent in the act of viewing. As information scholars and memory workers, we must critically examine the spaces that we curate and the stories that we inevitably force together in their literal physical proximity. If we are to really give life to liberatory stories and emancipatory futures, then we must practice a politics and pedagogy of refusal that does not allow for the creation and perpetuation of settler colonial fantasies. We must instead focus our energies on bringing the right stories to life, not just by night and out of sight, but by day and in the forefront of our realities and imaginations.

Figure 1. Night at the Museum screen capture of Sacagawea trying to speak to Larry Daley from behind the glass display case. [8]

Figure 2. Night at the Museum screen capture of Teddy Roosevelt's wax figure. [9]

Figure 3. Night at the Museum screen capture of Roosevelt's view of Sacagawea through his binoculars. [10]

Figure 4. Night at the Museum screen capture of Roosevelt walking up to Sacagawea from outside of the display case. [11]

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[1]Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (September 8, 2012): 14.

[2] Tuck and Yang, 14.

[3] Night at the Museum, directed by Shawn Levy (Twentieth Century Fox, 2006), 47:13, https://www.disneyplus.com/video/32082436-79a2-4eaa-b422-cf85038edd55.

[4] Night at the Museum, 1:30:45.

[5] Selene G. Phillips, “Mending Baskets: The Process of using Indigenous Epistemology to Reinterpret Sacagawea” (PhD diss., Purdue University, 2003), 61. 

[6] Night at the Museum, 1:37:04.

[7] Linda T. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 3rd ed. (Zed Books, 2021), 190.

[8] Night at the Museum, 27:17.

[9] Night at the Museum, 1:39:50.

[10] Night at the Museum, 38:33.

[11] Night at the Museum, 56:57.