Open Collections

Leischner, Emily Jean

University of British Columbia

Following the circulation of recorded Nuxalk voices in archives and museums, this dissertation examines moments where the collection, stewardship, and return of sound recordings overlaps with logics of resource extraction. To do this, I use community-based heritage research to partner with Nuxalk organizations, colleagues, and friends on community-led projects. With Nuxalk Radio, I co-created a series on the history of museum collecting called “Using and Refusing Museums” and facilitated returning copies of Nuxalk sound recordings at the Royal British Columbia Museum and the Canadian Museum of History. Throughout, I define recordings of Indigenous voices that circulate outside of their originating communities, removed from their authority and control, as captured audio. Theorizing captured audio through four case studies (1) reveals how recorded Indigenous voices undergo a social, material, and political process of transformation when they are taken outside of their originating communities, and (2) illustrates opportunities for disrupting the logic of Indigenous-voice-as-resource through experimental, community-engaged, and anti-extractive methods. Examining the research practices of the first person to record Nuxalk voices, anthropologist Thomas F. McIlwraith, I demonstrate how the history of museum collecting in Canada is entangled with extractive industries. By interviewing museum and archival staff, and taking seriously the positive reputation McIlwraith has in Nuxalk territory today, I argue that extractive logics are not deterministic or unavoidable. Placing the experiences of multiple generations of researchers and their Nuxalk collaborators in conversation, I examine how research methods – from the creation of captured audio to reciprocal relationships – emerge and persist across time. Drawing attention to the everyday ways staff both resist and reproduce extractive logics, I show that fragmenting settler legal regimes is a productive strategy for re-instating Indigenous authority in archives and museums using Indigenous laws. Interrogating university research practices, I argue that the academy is also implicated in the ongoing creation of captured audio. Nevertheless, it is possible to co-create audio recordings in the context of academic research that does not replicate the same process of transformation that captured audio undergoes. Taking a critical approach to my own audial research methodologies, I demonstrate that anti-extractive scholarship is worth striving for.

Text

2024-06-20

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/85201

Anthropology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/