Project Description
Our archive provides access to records pertaining to the formation of the state of Michigan. Records are primarily in the form of governmental treaties, maps, and some correspondence.
Our digital archive prioritizes access and alternate ways of thinking over traditional archival practices such as provenance and original order. We recognize the danger of presenting these records as originally organized by the colonial government. Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies serves as a guiding principle for our archival arrangement. While typical research projects emphasize specific disciplinary approaches, Smith reminds us that any research endeavor related to Indidgenous peoples deserves careful consideration of imperialism’s impact on knowledge creation. We argue that an archival project documenting the establishment of Michigan’s statehood is about colonialism. The goal is to recontextualize colonial records in a way that sheds light on historically silenced perspectives. Moreover, we want to arrange the records visually to generate new and diverse discussions about Michigan’s colonial history.
To locate relevant records we identified institutional collections holding official government records and primary source maps, statewide and federal. We searched the collections for related documents and maps that would illustrate the changes indicated in treaties.
We expect the primary users of our archive to be students and professionals researching history. The digital archive should facilitate interaction with primary source documents and lead to submitted and/or published historical analyses. A secondary audience may manifest as indigenous activist organizations getting in touch with ancestral history. Most of the selected records are written by colonial governments with some indications of Native American cooperation. Because of this, presenting the records as written could reinforce harmful colonial notions like manifest destiny and Indian culture as savage. To counteract colonial worldviews, descriptions focus on the effects on Native American tribes. We are approaching this task with cultural sensitivity at the forefront of our decision-making process.
