On Indigenous Peoples Day, the Human Rights Archives Section co-hosted a webinar with the Native American Archives Section about Native American boarding school records. If you couldn't make the event live, you can now view a recording via SAA's Online Learning Portal. Click here, log in, and "purchase" the recording (it's free and you won't be charged).
Thanks so much to National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition and the Native American Archives Section for working with us to...
The World Wide Web has had a profound impact on how we research and understand the past. The sheer amount of cultural information that is generated and, crucially, preserved every day in electronic form, presents exciting new opportunities for researchers. Much of this information is captured within web archives.
The project team invites archivists, researchers (from the humanities, social sciences, and beyond), librarians, computer scientists, and web archiving enthusiasts to join us over the...
Ni una menos (Not One Less) Chile and the programmatic line of memory and feminism of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights present the exhibition "Ni una menos Chile: Three years of struggle, resistance and rebellion."
This exhibition commemorates the three years of Ni Una menos Chile, a movement that began in response to the femicides that occurred in Argentina, and that in Chile has its beginning on October 19, the day on which it is convened, at the national level, to march against the...
From its origins in the 1750s, the white-led American abolitionist movement adhered to principles of "moral suasion" and nonviolent resistance as both religious tenet and political strategy. But by the 1850s, the population of enslaved Americans had increased exponentially, and such legislative efforts as the Fugitive Slave Act and the Supreme Court's 1857 ruling in the Dred Scott case effectively voided any rights black Americans held as enslaved or free people. As conditions deteriorated for...
Archives are meant to hold the memory of Australia, but whose memory? The history these official archives preserve and tell is funded, collected, configured, curated, and often created by the colonial settler state. As such, they reflect the state’s values and ideology. This is the power that the archives wield: they can turn ideology into history, opinion into fact.
Archives are unreliable witnesses, especially here on these lands of invasion and occupation. As a collection of fragments of...
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson yesterday ordered the White House to preserve all records relating to meetings and phone calls with foreign leaders, as well as all records on White House practices and policies for creating and keeping such records.
The unexpected order came in response to the lawsuit brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) together with the National Security Archive and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, filed in May...
On the 15th of October, the Nelson Mandela Foundation, in collaboration with the Hanns Seidel Foundation and Breathe Films, hosted a dialogue titled “Mining Bodies” in line with its mandate to address poverty and inequality as well as to reckon with the past. The dialogue delved significantly into the lived conditions of mineworkers, mining communities and South Africa’s historical economic reliance on the mining industry. Preluding the conversation, the Mining Bodies exhibition was opened at...
Something important to you missing from this newsletter? Send a submission my way and let me know what you would like to see.
Please submit newsletter items about archives and human rights (writ broadly) to hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com. These can be recent publications, upcoming events or exhibitions, opportunities and scholarships, or something else entirely as long as it connects to archives and human rights. For the November newsletter, please send you submission by November 22, 2019.
Happy...
Thousands of digitized records reflecting major historical events of the 20th century related to PEN International, a global writers’ organization, are available online beginning this month. A project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and completed by the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin has resulted in a new online finding aid for researchers, as well as access to teaching guides and nearly 5,000 digitized records.
PEN, an acronym for Poets,...
As a fellow librarian, I’m here to warn you: ICE is in your library stacks. Whether directly or indirectly, some of the companies that sell your library research services also sell surveillance data to law enforcement, including ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Companies like Thomson Reuters and RELX Group (formerly Reed Elsevier), are supplying billions of data points, bits of our personal information, updated in real time, to ICE’s surveillance program. Our data is being...
I spent the days after my meeting with the [Toronto Public Library] being attacked on social media by “gender critical” activists who called me a man, said I was ugly and called my speech “narcissistic” and “nuts.” The connection between the TPL’s decision and the emboldening of transphobic speech and attacks on trans women in public life seems to have been lost on most commentators, but it’s clear that the TPL’s actions have already resulted in significant harm to trans folks in Toronto and...
The Historical Archive of the National Police of Guatemala (AHPN) is in trouble. This unparalleled collection of Guatemalan police records, renowned throughout the hemisphere and across the world, limps along in a drastically reduced state.
A staff that once numbered in the hundreds has dwindled to 35 people, operating on temporary contracts that need to be renewed every couple of months. Guatemala’s government pledged to continue funding the AHPN but refused to accept international assistance...
Some of you may remember that I&A launched a survey earlier this year to gather preliminary data about the state of temporary labor in archives. We intended for this data to gird conversations about archival labor and to serve as one piece of a series of ongoing labor advocacy efforts across LAM professions.
Not surprisingly, many of the results supported current assumptions- archivists in precarious positions are for the most part anxious, stressed, and actively looking for work, even...
Two Charleston County sites with histories rooted in slavery have been accepted into an international coalition of places that connect the past and the present in thoughtful ways.
McLeod Plantation on James Island and the Caw Caw Interpretive Center in Ravenel, both operated by Charleston County Parks, are the first historic sites in South Carolina to be included in the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, a global network of historic sites, museums and memorials.
The Charleston...
For years, the New York Police Department illegally maintained a database containing the fingerprints of thousands of children charged as juvenile delinquents — in direct violation of state law mandating that police destroy these records after turning them over to the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services. When lawyers representing some of those youths discovered the violation, the police department dragged its feet, at first denying but eventually admitting that it was retaining prints...
A whistleblower who works in Project Nightingale, the secret transfer of the personal medical data of up to 50 million Americans from one of the largest healthcare providers in the US to Google, has expressed anger to the Guardian that patients are being kept in the dark about the massive deal.
The anonymous whistleblower has posted a video on the social media platform Daily Motion that contains a document dump of hundreds of images of confidential files relating to Project Nightingale. The...
Something important to you missing from this newsletter? Send a submission my way and let me know what you would like to see.
Please submit newsletter items about archives and human rights (writ broadly) to hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com. These can be recent publications, upcoming events or exhibitions, opportunities and scholarships, or something else entirely as long as it connects to archives and human rights. For the December newsletter, please send you submission by December 13, 2019.
For the occasion of International Human Rights Day, which falls on December 10th every year, I sat down with Chris Laico, Archivist at RBML, who along with Carrie Smith, is responsible for processing human rights related collections. I asked Chris a few questions about archives, human rights, his daily work, what keeps him up at night, and what keeps him going, and here is what he said.
Read the interview here.
272 million people around the world, according to the statistics of the International Organisation for Migration, are migrants. One in ten people in developed countries are foreign-born.
They are working to build new lives and livelihoods for themselves in other countries, often far from home, leaving behind danger, poverty or discrimination. With the effects of climate change, the phenomenon of displacement linked to extreme or changing weather patterns is set to become more and more common (...
In case you missed it, there is a new SAA section that may be of interest to HRA Section members. It's the Accessibility and Disability Section! The section statement is below and you can see the group page, including standing rules and other resources, here.
The hope for this section is that is it can be an inclusive community for people with disabilities and allies, where they can learn from each other, compile resources, and showcase work and collections promoting accessibility and...
Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia (A4BLiP) is a loose association of archivists, librarians, and allied professionals in the Philadelphia region responding to the issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement. The A4BLiP Anti-Racist Description Resources project began as an initiative formed by various A4BLiP members in fall of 2017, specifically after a presentation they collaborated on at the 2017 SAA Liberated Archive forum with Teressa Raiford.
Teressa is a Portland-based...
Two weeks ago I met with a community leader whose own community was devastated by a genocide that happened decades ago in a place halfway around the world. We talked about how his community marks the event, the pain its survivors continue to experience and the challenge of getting his new neighbors to care about something so foreign to them. One of the things he mentioned struck a chord with me: “Recognition is about completing the fabric of our wider community.” To him, recognizing genocide...
Working with partners Nadia’s Initiative (NI), Un Ponte Per (UPP), and local stakeholder groups, the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience is currently developing plans for a museum and memorial that recognizes the atrocities committed against the Yazidi people in Iraq since 2014 and shares the larger history of the Yazidi community.
Content note: this post mentions abuse of children and sexual violence, including sexual slavery. Read the post in its entirety here.
Join us for a special event about the woman’s suffrage movement, challenges faced by early women leaders, and why suffrage still matters today. Explore the synergies of the suffrage and abolition movements as well as the many challenges faced by black women, who continue to struggle for both gender and racial equality. Speakers will include Dr Carol Lasser, Dr. Treva B. Lindsey, and Jen Miller.
The League of Women Voters of Ohio will also be providing free intersectional book reading lists and...
A new film by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) will be screened in Montréal on Sunday about the work of the Rwandan-Canadian community to pursue justice against suspected war criminals identified in Canada after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.
The short documentary film, created in partnership with the organization PAGE-Rwanda, looks at the surprising discovery in Canada of Léon Mugesera and Désiré Munyaneza – accused of crimes against humanity for inciting genocide and...
