Community Archives: The Shaping of Memory

Abstract

Bastian and Alexander have arranged this collection of essays on community archives into five parts, beginning with two essays that contextualise what follows, socially (Flinn and Stevens) and historically (Mander’s overview of the development of community archives in Britain). The second part, Communities and Non-traditional Record Keeping, begins with The Single Noongar Claim: Native Title, Archival Records and Aboriginal Community in Western Australia, an edited version of Glen Kelly’s address to the I-CHORA IV conference in Perth, Australia. Informal in tone, the paper traces the process of gathering and assessing evidence in support of a native title claim, including anthropological and pseudo-anthropological sources. Kelly discusses the records produced by the office of the Protector of Aborigines and the Christian missions, including the ‘caste cards’ that were ‘used to track the caste or blood quantum of people’, to classify them ‘native or not’. Kelly shows how the record now runs contrary to the intentions of the record makers and the fears of the subjects of the records; in documenting a ‘dying race’ the white anthropologists and clerks of the native welfare system created records that would be used to claim indigenous sovereignty, while, having learnt not to speak to white visitors, the Noongars created a gap in the record that would weaken the claim made by their descendants. Patricia Galloway’s Oral Tradition in Living Cultures: the Role of Archives in the Preservation of Memory is similarly well-situated in this part. Exploring two very different communities’ relation with the ‘other’ system of information exchange, Galloway demonstrates that across communities a diversity of modes of transmission are being adopted and will continue to work in conjunction with others. The two communities examined by the author are medical students, shown to be embedded in a ‘literate context’ but engaged in the oral transmission of mnemonics that aid in the study of anatomy, and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians who are adopting writing to preserve a formerly exclusively oral language. Eric Ketelaar’s A Living Archive, Shared by Communities of Records, appears in Part Three, Records Loss, Destruction and Recovery. Ketelaar’s reputation as a leading theorist in the field of archival science is upheld in this expertly conceived and Journal of the Society of Archivists Vol. 32, No. 1, April 2011, 161–166