By Mira Kudva Driskell, People and Nature Collectives
The Community Archives, hosted on Mukurtu, exist to ensure that Adivasi-Indigenous communities can document and safeguard traditional knowledge; unlike our Institutional Archives, which are open access, community archives are accessible by community members, and designed to respect cultural norms around knowledge transfer. In doing so, we hope to break with archival practices that alienate traditional knowledge from Indigenous communities.
On Monday, April 28th, People and Nature Collective staff and community fellows gathered on Keystone Campus for a workshop on overseeing the governance of Digital Cultural Assets on the Community Archives. Digital Cultural Assets are digitized representations of cultural heritage assets (including artefacts, artwork, language, etc.)—this model reduce the need for physical handling of archival items, and enhances accessibility. Amal P (Malamuthan), Aswathi GV, Geetha M (Paniya), Kavyanjali (Kurichya), Nandana (Paniya), Sumithra K (Kattunaickan), Suresh P (Kattunaickan), Syamjith PK (Malamuthan), and Vinod C (Cholanaickan) made the long journey from Wayanad and Nilambur to attend the training, while Dan, Faisal, and Ranjani guided the group. Kavyanjali has already taken up Paniya language documentation on the Community Archives; one goal of the workshop was to expand language documentation in Kerala.
During the training, community members from Wayanad and Nilambur learned how to upload items onto the archive, with a particular focus on creating language glossaries. There was also a collaborative conversation around how to create more categories—in line with the goal of creating a resource for Adivasi-Indigenous communities, this conversation, alongside others, will shape future work. This workshop was just one step in the long journey of expanding the Community Archives; we look forward to see where further research will take us.
Photos by Syamjith.
