| Abstrakt: |
Current procedures of Federal Recognition—the "legal acknowledgement" of the sovereign and separate political status of tribal nations by the US government—require tribes to document their history, race, culture, and genealogy, and to submit the evidence for review to the Office of Federal Acknowledgement (OFA), where federal agents sit in critical judgment of the petitioning groups' identity and tribal status. However, many of the types of evidence required and accepted by the OFA as legitimate and official have been destroyed, or removed, or appropriated from these groups; are held, undisclosed, by the very federal agencies that require their production; or were created by non-Indians or the state itself with a clear intent of Indigenous dispossession. This paper argues that evidence, as currently conceived, used, and legitimated by the OFA, perpetuates settler colonial anxieties and practices of exclusion, racism, appropriation and erasure. Rooted in colonial and legal conceptions of evidence, the Federal Recognition policy fails to consider the contexts, temporalities, histories, and cultures of the petitioning tribes. Applying ethnography of the archive/document ethnography, the paper first examines the role(s) that colonial archives play structurally in the Federal Recognition process, particularly in supporting the ways in which settler colonial thinking permeates and predetermines those processes. Secondly, it investigates ways in which archivists could assist tribes in navigating this convoluted and biased process by formulating and legitimizing anticolonial conceptions of evidence that take into account tribal contexts and practices of creation. Finally, it considers how this conceptual, epistemological and practical shift can lead to a more unified effort to decolonize archival praxis within tribal sovereignty claims and purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
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