Indigenous Archival Activism
Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory
Tracing one tribe’s fifty-year fight to recover and rewrite its history, Indigenous Archival Activism takes readers into the heart of debates over who owns and has the right to tell Native American history and stories. Rose Miron tells the story of the Stockbridge–Munsee Mohican Nation and its Historical Committee, showing how their work is exemplary of how tribal archives can strategically shift how Native history is accessed, represented, written, and, most important, controlled.
Indigenous Archival Activism is a necessary volume on the intersection of Indigenous knowledge loss, recovery, and production in the context of settler colonialism. Presenting a community history centered on institution-building, knowledge, education, and activism, Rose Miron challenges an accepted narrative about a vanished people with a deeply researched project that centers their persistence and relevance.
Jacki Thompson Rand, Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The past several decades have seen a massive shift in debates over who owns and has the right to tell Native American history and stories. For centuries, non-Native actors have collected, stolen, sequestered, and gained value from Native stories and documents, human remains, and sacred objects. However, thanks to the work of Native activists, Native history is now increasingly repatriated back to the control of tribes and communities. Indigenous Archival Activism takes readers into the heart of these debates by tracing one tribe’s fifty-year fight to recover and rewrite its history.
Rose Miron tells the story of the Stockbridge–Munsee Mohican Nation and its Historical Committee, a group composed mostly of Mohican women who have been collecting and reorganizing historical materials since 1968. She shows how their work is exemplary of how tribal archives can strategically shift how Native history is accessed, represented, written, and, most important, controlled. Based on a more than decade-long reciprocal relationship with the Stockbridge–Munsee Mohican Nation, Miron’s research and writing are shaped primarily by materials found in the tribal archive and ongoing conversations and input from the Stockbridge–Munsee Historical Committee.
Miron is not Mohican and is careful to consider her own positionality and reflects on what it means for non-Native researchers and institutions to build reciprocal relationships with Indigenous nations in the context of academia and public history, offering a model both for tribes undertaking their own reclamation projects and for scholars looking to work with tribes in ethical ways.
Indigenous Archival Activism is a necessary volume on the intersection of Indigenous knowledge loss, recovery, and production in the context of settler colonialism. Presenting a community history centered on institution-building, knowledge, education, and activism, Rose Miron challenges an accepted narrative about a vanished people with a deeply researched project that centers their persistence and relevance.
Jacki Thompson Rand, Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Brilliantly narrating the story of a tribal community’s reclamation of their history, Indigenous Archival Activism represents a path forward for tribes to tell their own stories and is a must-read for archivists, researchers, and tribal historians working with/in Indian Country. Rose Miron contests the mythology of the ‘last of the Mohicans,’ speaking to the vibrancy of the Stockbridge-Munsee people and celebrating contemporary Indigeneity.
Shannon Martin, Lynx Clan, Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians; former director, Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways
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