Archives: Research, Recovery, Reimaginings
Moderator: Martha Langford, Research Chair and Director, Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute
Bringing together academic researchers and archival professionals, this panel explored the crucial role archival institutions play in shaping the kinds of histories that are told, and in determining who gives voice to these stories. While some panelists considered the potential for community-based knowledge and archives to offer important challenges to dominant historical narratives, moderator Martha Langford also encouraged workshop participants to question the binaries of history and counter-history, archive and counter-archive. Langford asked: does the authority to interpret the past reside within “official” histories, or the records of institutional archives, both of which have largely been produced by minority, albeit dominant, groups; or does it reside within community histories and archives that reflect more broad-based and inclusive perspectives? Each panelist engaged in their own way with these tensions between authorised and alternative histories in archival contexts.
As the Special Media Unit Manager at the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, Joshua Green opened the panel with a discussion of the challenges and opportunities associated with preserving, describing, and providing access to records that require specialised handling, storage, and equipment. While Green’s work takes place in the context of an institutional archive, his presentation highlighted the fact that even “official” records betray the fragility and constructedness of the truths they claim to document. Green discussed, for example, an 18th-century British map of the territory that would become Fredericton, showing the locations of Acadian houses and Wolastoqi villages – evidence of non-British territorial occupations that would disappear from subsequent maps of the region. Green observed that maps, particularly in imperial contexts, functioned as “political instruments” to project “imagined geographies” and desired social orders onto historical landscapes that were often far more complex and contested on the ground. Citing the use of historical maps and landscape drawings in Indigenous land claims cases, Green’s presentation also highlighted the potential for official archives to be read against the grain to produce counter-imperial histories.
Anne Koval (Professor of Art History and Museum and Curatorial Studies, Mount Allison University) discussed elements of her research process in preparing her recent monograph, Mary Pratt: A Love Affair with Vision (2023) in her presentation. Koval’s reflections on her close engagement with the Mary Pratt fonds at the Mount Allison University Archives interrogated the very idea of the monolithic, authoritative archive. Koval questioned the possibility of finding singular or stable “truths” within archival collections by highlighting the multiplicity of perspectives that can co-exist even within the same body of records. Koval examined a collection of photographic slides, produced by Pratt and her husband, that Pratt used as source material for her paintings. Comparing Pratt’s paintings to their photographic “originals” makes visible what Koval refers to as Pratt’s artistic process of elimination, where Pratt removes or alters in her paintings certain features from reality that are documented in her photographs. Bringing Pratt’s photography into conversation with her paintings as Koval has done illuminates the multiplicity of perspectives one artist can bring to the same historical event or subject, depending on the time and purpose of their documentation.
Stephanie Pettigrew, in her capacity as Data Analyst with Library and Archives Canada (LAC), also reflected on the possibilities for unearthing lesser-known histories from institutional archives. Using her doctoral research on blasphemy and witchcraft trials in New France as a case study, Pettigrew demonstrated how state and institutional records (including census data, ships' manifests, and baptismal records) could be used to reconstruct kinship and other social networks within a community. Linking records in this way enabled Pettigrew to answer historical questions that were not immediately apparent within formulaic official records. Pettigrew’s current work is aimed at enabling LAC users to perceive these links between records in tracing community networks by developing new online search functions. For Pettigrew, this work in data management is a means to facilitating archival access and cultivating inclusive histories. She concluded her presentation by observing: “When we are able to make archival resources more accessible to more people, not only in terms of access but in terms of the ability to analyse what those collections hold, we will find that the increase in perspectives and ideas will break down the myths we hold about ourselves and our own history.”
Presentations by Sharon Murray (Archives Advisor, Council of Nova Scotia Archives) and Graham Nickerson (Black Loyalist researcher and Community Inclusion Liaison for the City of Fredericton) emphasised the importance of mobilising community-based knowledge and archives in producing inclusive histories. Using the 1784 “Shelburne race riots” as an example (although Nickerson interrogated the validity of each of these terms), Nickerson’s presentation illustrated how simplistic narratives depicting Black Loyalists as a monolithic community, a phenomenon he refers to as “the (Black) Loyalist myth,” have come to dominate popular and academic interpretations of Atlantic Canadian history. His own work developing innovative digital history and outreach projects, including the Black Atlantic Network Gazetteer (BANG!), attempts to make historical records and research accessible to Black communities in Atlantic Canada. Nickerson’s aim is to bring Black Atlantic Canadians into the process of producing historical knowledge about their own communities, which will also have the benefit of correcting and adding nuance to our understandings of these histories.
Sharon Murray’s presentation spoke to the challenges faced by Nova Scotia’s predominantly rural community archives when it comes to being chronically under resourced and under utilised in comparison with institutional archives. She began her remarks by asking the audience: “How can we, as a group with a vested interest in advancing visual and material culture research in Canada, help unlock the potential in community archives?” Murray argued that the potential of community archives lies in their ability to help unearth “under-recorded” histories that are rarely preserved in institutional archives. As an example of the different histories that emerge in institutional versus community-based records, Murray contrasted the photographic views of Africville produced by City officials in the 1950s and 1960s that currently reside in the Halifax Municipal Archives with the images, taken by photographer Bob Brooks in the same period, that the Africville Museum has chosen to use to commemorate the community. While one series of images reflects officials’ views of Africville as an “urban blight,” the Africville Museum’s visual archive presents a thriving Black Nova Scotian community. For Murray, the work of the Africville Museum is a powerful example of the importance of community archives in enabling historically under-represented communities to determine how they are remembered.
A wide-ranging discussion of the human elements of archival production, research, and collections management ensued. Conceptions of the archive as a repository of records produced by individuals, with their own foibles and obsessions, were explored by Martha Langford, among others. Andrea Terry emphasised the demanding labour undertaken by archival and curatorial professionals, suggesting that conversations about preservation in archival settings should include efforts to preserve and support the people who are involved in stewarding collections. Conversation also circled around the embodied and subjective experiences of archival research, and the traces that individual researchers leave of the pathways they navigate through collections. Sharon Murray pointed out, for example, that records regularly requested by researchers are often the ones that are digitised and made more accessible to the public, thereby further entrenching well-travelled pathways through the archives.