Description
"This paper traces how interpretive media at a number of US National Park Service sites has been archived at the federal level—or not—and the implications of those gaps in the record. Over the past several years, many individual parks in the NPS have retired older audiovisual stories shown in visitor centers for newer media that intentionally update interpretations of the parks, defining them at least in part as indigenous spaces. Though Harpers Ferry Center, the Media Production center for the NPS, keeps the original media objects and some records about those objects, it is not clear which entities maintain records that detail how decisions regarding media changes at each park were made, or if such records exist. Indeed, the lack of documentation about the evolution of Parks’ Service interpretative media has been remarked on by National Parks archivists themselves.
The relationship between the National Park Service and Native Americans has been an active area of research for some time; less developed are questions concerning how film preservation, audiovisual archiving practices, and culturally inclusive cataloguing play a role in the ways the parks are perceived.
Canadian archivists have been at the forefront in understanding how indigenous knowledge and memories can and must become part of the official archive. This work—especially the scholarship of Krista McCracken and the Association of Canadian Archivists regarding how to act on the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission—informs how I understand what individual parks within the NPS have begun to do.
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