Next week, the Data Literacy Program’s (DLP’s) Paulina F. Przystupa will attend the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums (ATALM) conference alongside Dr. Wade Campbell and Dr. Andrea Torvinen. Together they’ll facilitate the listening session Working with CARE and Indigenous Data Sovereignty as Accomplices and they hope you can join them.
This year, ATALM’s International Conference runs 24-26 October in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. For those who aren’t familiar with ATALM, they are “a not-for-profit educational organization that serves the needs of those who work to protect and advance Indigenous cultures.”
This year the primary focus areas are: Archives, Historic Preservation, Language, Libraries, and Museums, which fit many of the interests of the DLP specifically and the Alexandria Archive Institute (AAI) broadly. Alongside Paulina, Dr. Campbell, and Dr. Torvinen, will facilitate the listening session and for those that want to know more, here’s the abstract:
“The Alexandria Archive Institute is a non-profit, non-Indigenous, organization that connects various publics with archaeological data. This listening session discusses how Alexandria Archive Institute’s work and partnerships can better serve Indigenous communities & advocate for Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, & Ethics (CARE) principles. It highlights the partnership with the Pan-American Ceramics Project, an open-access web application developing a collaborative digital platform for ceramic data that incorporates Indigenous and western scientific worldviews. Participants are invited to discuss how the Alexandria Archive Institute can serve and address the goals of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities.
The Pan-American Ceramics Project is the focus of Dr. Torvinen’s work as a scholar in the Networking Archaeological Data and Communities NEH Institute, also a program of the AAI. Her research in West Mexico and the U.S. Southwest focuses on the themes of community resilience, social identities, and collection action through the study of ceramic technology, specifically compositional methods related to the choices potters made and how those choices intersect with their socioeconomic or political networks.
Dr. Wade Campbell (Diné; Boston University) is a new colleague of AAI and an advisory board member of PACP who is interested in making archaeological research more useful for Native communities. Outside this work, Dr. Campbell’s Early Navajo Pastoral Landscape Project examines the relationships between Diné communities and the practice of sheepherding from the 17th century to the present day, particularly as they relate to changing histories of land use in Diné Bikéyah.
For those who can join them for Working with CARE and Indigenous Data Sovereignty as Accomplices, (Session 311) you’ll find them in Automobile Alley C Room 11, 2:30-3:30 p.m. on Wednesday 25 October. As part of the session, they’ll have some worksheets for folks to fill out. If you’d like to download a copy ahead of time (or see what they’ll be discussing) you can grab a copy here. Hope to see you there!