Can Aboriginal oral knowledge be archived without trust?

Faulkhead, Shannon; Huebner, Sharon; Russell, Lynette, Monash University.

Distrust is a term that encompasses the emotions felt, and opinions held by the Aboriginal community in regards to the capturing and accessing of oral knowledge and records.

The recording and documenting of Australia’s historical knowing is still dominated by the invading colonial culture. Other voices that enter the public domain are often questioned and reinterpreted, fostering distrust by Indigenous communities. Examples include:

1. Indigenous knowledge being sanitised and reinterpreted;
2. Debates regarding the validity and or value of Indigenous knowledge;
3. Lack of recognition of Indigenous rights;
4. Culturally inappropriate practices of collection, use, storage and access of Indigenous knowledge; and
5. Inflexibility of current archives to include alternate, dissenting or questioning voices in collections.

The ‘Trust and Technology project: building archival systems for Indigenous oral memory’ recognises that distrust exists and has addressed the Indigenous community direct as to the processes and conditions that would be required for trust in an archival system to occur.

So far this project has found that the Aboriginal community wants increased access control, however, this does not necessarily mean that trust will follow. Until the underlying issues of control of current Indigenous records are addressed, any Indigenous archival system will not have the trust required to succeed.

This paper will investigate some ways in which an archival system for oral knowledge can achieve trust by investigating the issues of reinterpretation, sanitisation, validation and value in relation to Indigenous knowledge.