UC Berkeley

Salvage Constellations investigates how some Indigenous communities in northern California are represented in ethnological archives, and how such archival entanglements work to transform present acts of cultural knowledge production and political exchange. Using multi-sited archives and public records as both a source and subject of inquiry, this project argues that archival practices and rationalities not only play a co-constituting role in the material dispossession of Indigenous peoples in California and elsewhere, but shape the conditions of legibility for Indigenous knowledges and constrain epistemological self-determination—even as modes of archival access, consultation, and community collaboration improve. Moreover, by enlisting the writings of Native American poets, scholars, and activists, and bringing them in tension with and in relation to German Jewish essayist Walter Benjamin’s writings on collecting and historical remembrance, this study probes the potential of alternate practices of archival reading and memory, and foregrounds how Indigenous groups’ own political and epistemological interventions are transforming contemporary practices of archival and institutional stewardship.