Centering Care Within Conversations of Curation: A Heart-Centered Approach to the Tłı̨chǫ Archive and Museum

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Landscapes of Care: Exploring Heart-centered Practice in Historical Archaeology", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Traditionally, cultural belongings have been housed in large institutions, often leading to a disconnect between them and their communities. Faced with calls for reconciliation, however, many institutions are at a loss for what to do with these belongings, often prioritizing institutional “ownership” over Indigenous rights. Community-based archives/museum spaces offer a solution by placing control back into the hands of the community itself and supporting the intergenerational transmission of knowledge. In partnership with the Tłı̨chǫ Government (Dene, Treaty 11, NWT Canada), this paper presents the results of an ethnographic exploration into Tłı̨chǫ traditions for care and knowledge organization to articulate Tłı̨chǫ principles of curation (e.g., ownership, preservation, categorization, repatriation, etc.). Centering our conversations around care allowed for us to embrace the relationships surrounding the belonging (whether tangible or intangible) and start to re-imagine the structures underlying curation into a cultural heritage management system based on Tłı̨chǫ traditional values.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025   •
• Landscapes of Care: Exploring Heart-centered Practice in Historical Archaeology

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow