2026 Archival History Article Award Winner: Raymond O. Frogner

Each year since 2018, the Archival History Section has given out its Archival History Article Award. The prize rewards an article or other short piece of excellence published in the previous calendar year in the field of archival history, regardless of subject, time period, or national boundaries. This year we were pleased to present the award to Raymond O. Frogner for his article “Red Jenkinson: Tracing Indigenous Influences on Archival Theory,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2025 issue of Archivaria. 

As Head of Archives at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) since 2016, Raymond Frogner is responsible for honouring, safeguarding, and facilitating responsible access to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s (TRC) records and additional materials of enduring value to Indigenous Peoples. Born in Port Alberni, British Columbia Raymond received his Master of Arts in Labour History from the University of Victoria and a Master of Archival Studies from the University of British Columbia. His graduate work focused on archives and Indigenous identity. He continues to research and publish on archival issues with a focus on Indigenous societies, identity and memory. 

His article, “Red Jenkinson: Tracing Indigenous Influences on Archival Theory,” published in the Archivaria 100 Special Issue on Critical Theory in Archives, provides an essential and in some sense missed, intellectual history of modernist archival theory. Frogner traces the “Indigenous imaginative thread” as it was repressed by what he calls the “imperial episteme” of Enlightenment-age social theorists. He follows this thread through Hilary Jenkinson’s writings on British companies in Africa, referring to Jenkinson’s simultaneous recognition of his entangled subjectivity and disavowal of responsibility as quintessentially “modern.” He then turns to Franz Boas, his relationship to Indigenous researcher George Hunt, and their studies of the Kwakwaka’wak people in what is now British Columbia. He reads Boas’ records for their evasive sense of documentary provenance, as well as their “false patina of authenticity” and objectivity. The article continues to unearth the lineage of these anthropological practices, exploring French anthropologist Marcel Mauss’ work The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Frogner historicizes what Brien Brothman first identified as “the social implications of the archives as a generational gift for any theory of social order” as Mauss seeking “normative reciprocal relationships within collectivities and not among acquisitive individuals” in the wake of the first World War. He follows the Indigenous imaginary through Levi-Strauss’ 1952 Race and History, which both prefigured and refuted the 1969 Canadian federal government’s white paper on Indigenous rights. Frogner writes that through all of these iterations of European anthropology, the Indigenous voice, “however faint in the context of colonial repression – consistently expressed unaddressed arguments for unique collective humanity until it was finally recognized in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”

The article then passes through the contemporary history of archival thought and its anthropological genealogies, specifically the debates over appraisal and the work of Duranti, Cook, Schwarz, and Derrida. The essay concludes with the importance of Indigenous data sovereignty, Frogner arguing that “the digital environment has the potential to challenge the siloed knowledge paradigm enshrined in Boasian methodology.” In the article’s final passage, Frogner, articulates a vision of a “decolonizing archives” to which we can aspire: 

The ultimate goal of a decolonizing archives is to create new conceptual spaces where the holistic and inherent orders of Indigenous communities can grow uninhibited to cross-pollinate with the individual Enlightenment principles of European thought and to freely seed new hybrid flowers of self-understanding in a colourful garden of collective and individual rights, unhindered and undomesticated by centuries of imperial judgment. To use our resources of self-remembrance for purposes of creativity, love, and freedom – not surveillance, colonial judgment, and control.

Frogner was awarded the prize at the Annual Business Meeting of the Archival History Section on May 21, 2026.

Patrick McGee, Archival History Section Steering Committee Member

The biographical information for Raymond Frogner is drawn from the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at University of Manitoba website.