Afterlives of Indigenous Archives: Essays in Honor of "The Occom Circle" [Book Review]

• Main Author: Lopenzina, Drew
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: ODU Digital Commons 2020
• Subjects: Archival Science; Indigenous Studies; anishina*
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/english_fac_pubs/133; https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1135&context=english_fac_pubs

(First paragraph) Afterlives of Indigenous Archives takes its title from Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor who is, in turn, repurposing a quote from French theorist Jacques Derrida who, in his 1995 work, Archive Fever, referred to the archive as that which gestures toward “an excess of life,” something that “resists annihilation” (183). This excess, or “afterlife,” of the archive remains, for Vizenor at least, an unexpected location of Indigenous survivance—a site from which, despite every violent attempt to colonially contain and collapse Native presence, it is still possible to carry something forward from the ruins of representation. With this in mind, Afterlives offers a collection of essays from scholars who either study, curate, or produce Indigenous archives, providing a useful roadmap of how the archive might serve as a site for furthering Indigenous scholarship and Indigenous stories of survivance in the twenty-first century.