By Rohini Singh, Master of Archival Studies / University of British Columbia
Introduction
The FOCAS project at the University of British Columbia took off in summer 2024 under Dr. Jennifer Douglas with two community archives student internships, a curriculum development project and an exercise of mapping British Columbia-based community archives. I joined the project as a Graduate Academic Assistant (GAA) and worked on the latter two projects this past year while enrolled in the Master of Archival Studies program. The community archives mapping project is a part of a larger effort within the FOCAS network to document and make available information about local and regional community archives. This would possibly be the first such effort in British Columbia to geographically and thematically map the presence of different community-based archives, with an aim to not just create a database but also tease out a typology that would be rooted in a Canadian context. The scholarship within the field of archival studies, coming predominantly from Western societies like United States, the UK and Australia, has given us several definitions of community archives to work with – of those founded and run by communities who have been marginalized by “traditional” and “mainstream” archives from representation, management and access.
As someone not born and raised in Canada, I, in my lazy naivete, found it convenient to paint the archival trajectories of these countries and Canada in the same broad strokes and apply pre-existing definitions and their criteria to all. It was eye-opening to delve into the history of archival management through the course of my studies at UBC and this project with FOCAS, and separate the Canadian, and specifically the English Canadian experience, from that of other countries it usually gets clubbed with.
The Canadian Context Conundrum
Undertaking this mapping exercise provided us with an opportunity to think about a more Canadian conception of community archives, one that accounts for the trajectory that archives and archival management has followed in this country. The concept of “Total Archives” sets Canada apart from its geographical and intellectual neighbours. As a young, settler nation attempting to deliberately build a documentary heritage and historiography that validated the creation of the country and instilled a particular sense of national pride among its citizens, a broader view of archival material that included private as well as government records was needed. As noted by Laura Miller[1] , greater importance was given to collecting and preserving documents of “historical significance” rather than emphasizing more traditional concepts of originality, or whether a record was a public or private record. She further highlights how the complexities of records management with evolving formats and mediums, burgeoning public records, growing scope of private records, and greater awareness of the diverse ethnicities and identities that shaped Canadian society required a shift from Total Archives towards a national “archival system” towards the 1970s and 1980s, that situated the responsibility of managing and preserving records within the organization and communities where the records originated. We have in that same time period seen a rise in the number of local, identity and/or cause-based archives that have their own unique acquisition and governance policies.
This has resulted in an overlap in the mandates of public and private, community-led archives, especially at the level of city and municipal archives where archives are built from records belonging to individuals, families and associations which are usually associated with community archives. This overlap was evident in our project’s crowdsourcing efforts, where many people submitted names of local municipal archives to contribute to the mapping exercise. My thoughts often oscillated between imposing a certain definition of community archives to sift through the entries and creating an inclusive typology that does not exclude the local archives but does not confuse them with other community archives either. The latter would create some room for a more Canadian-centered understanding to emerge. We were also interested in understanding if local municipal archives who see themselves as community archives, and community archives that challenge the histories of exclusion from mainstream archives could benefit from working with each other.
Generational Approach to Community Archives
Many Canadian museums and archives that call themselves community archives started out as historical societies, documenting the histories of “pioneers” and their families who settled in different towns and river valleys in the 1800s; they carry predominantly White-settler, male accounts of city-building, industry and infrastructure development. Some of these have included the histories of First Nations and other racial communities that lived and worked in these regions, but that does not form the main core of their collection. Given that Canada has had a pre-existing culture of documenting and preserving photographs, oral histories, ephemera and records of people in service of their local community’s histories, these archives can be seen as the first generation of community archives – albeit narrow in their scope and mandate, lacking in diversity and representation and more aligned with the original purpose of building a Euro-centric Canadian historiography.
The second generation of community archives in this framework would then be those we are more familiar with in the FOCAS project and community archives literature – those in service of historically excluded and marginalized identities, that decenter a combination of the White, male, heteronormative and ablest histories privileged in mainstream archives and give these communities agency over management, description and access of the records.
In our mapping efforts we also tried to identify “potential community archives” – organizations or groups who have worked on socially and/or culturally relevant themes or issues for years but do not have an explicit archive of their work, or cultural societies and associations of different racial and ethnic groups that are still at the stage of mobilizing community support and creating a space for greater representation and dialogue.
A small but significant subset of the archives that responded to our survey work on environmental causes, health and safety issues, humanitarian issues, etc. which were distinct from the identity-based community archives and could be a category of their own.
To distinguish these archives from each other, we tagged them under different subjects. All 49 entries gathered through a combination of efforts – crowdsourcing, internet searches and our own knowledge – have been temporarily split into the following categories:
- Municipal/White Settler (pioneer and city histories seen through records of private citizens, local newspapers, etc.),
- Race/Ethnicity (South Asian, Black, Chinese Clan Associations),
- Neighbourhood/Built Heritage (histories of different neighbourhoods in transition or erased by the city),
- Professional/Skills-based (firefighters, crafts history),
- First Nations
- Gender/Sexual Orientation (gender violence, LGBTQ archives),
- Environment/Nature (forestry archives, watershed protection),
- Issue-based (drug abuse, shelter for refugee families)
Roughly 17 of them fall under the Municipal category, which still leaves us with over 30 distinct community-based archives of varying sizes and efforts. For me, the environmental archives form a fascinating category that deserves more research. Archives of natural resources would either be subsumed in museums or departmental records, but finding efforts dedicated exclusively to them outside of these spaces made for a great discovery. Another great find was a publication with photographs of, and first-hand stories shared by street and home-based residents of a neighbourhood in neglect that humanizes their experiences. Can a book be a community archive? In this case, it felt so.
We recognize that some of the archives will naturally fall under more than one of the categories, and that these tags may not completely capture their true essence. We are also aware that many First Nations archives do not necessarily identify as “community” archives but rather as archives of sovereign territories. There is a lot of work to be done in refining these categories and what we seek to do with all the information gathered. We captured their names, location, collection mandates, links to digital finding aids, contact information and their outreach platforms (social media, website, etc.). The geographical spread of these archives was also tracked separately by keeping a count of the number of archives located in a particular city, town or village. While Vancouver led with over 16 archives, other cities like Abbotsford and Duncan followed with 3 archives each. This is in no way an exhaustive list, and reaching out to more local networks may reveal more names that we haven’t yet come across.
Going Forward
As we wrap up the first year of the project, we are taking stock of the information we have collected so far and are thinking about how the database can be used beyond as a directory. Part of the fun of doing this exercise was seeing potential collaborations, knowledge exchange and the possible creation of a network that would facilitate greater interaction among these different archives. A workshop with some of these archives for the curriculum designing project mentioned earlier also revealed the benefits of creating spaces for bringing practitioners together, irrespective of whether these gatherings are centered around the work they do. We have left some room for these ideas to grow through conversations amongst ourselves and with some of these archives. The end of the first year of the FOCAS project also marks the end of my stint as a GAA. Engaging with the ideas of community archives through existing scholarship to build a curriculum and doing a ground survey for the mapping exercise helped me acknowledge my own blind spots and biases and recognize community archives in the many forms and shapes they can take. While I will no longer be formally associated with the project, I do not see it as the end of my collaboration and engagement with what we have started building, but as an ongoing conversation that I will find myself revisiting.
[1] Millar, Laura. 1998. “Discharging Our Debt: The Evolution of the Total Archives Concept in English Canada”. Archivaria 46 (February):103-46. https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/12677.