Michigan Land Changes Through the First Half of the 19th Century

Potentially Harmful Content Statement

The Michigan Land Changes Digital Archive provides access to some of the digital photographs, documents, maps, treaties, and papers available surrounding the history of the creation of the State of Michigan. Some of these documents were created by the United States federal government and United States government representatives.

The archive and included pages may contain some content that may be harmful or difficult to view for certain groups. It is our intent to display and provide context to historical records for learning and garnering respect for all cultures, specifically those who have faced historic and systematic oppression. As a result, some of the materials presented here may reflect outdated, biased, offensive, and possibly violent views and opinions. In addition, some of the materials may relate to violent or graphic events and are preserved simply for their historical significance and to acknowledge the injustices faced by Indigenous tribes, nations, peoples, and their descendants. 

The archive is committed to working with peers and communities to assess and update harmful descriptions. While this is a class assignment and not a long-term process, we aim to establish author standards to prevent harmful language in descriptions.

Some included items may:

• reflect racist, sexist, ableist, misogynistic/misogynoir, and xenophobic opinions and attitudes;

be discriminatory towards or exclude diverse views on sexuality, gender, religion, and more;

include graphic content of historical events such as violent death, medical procedures, crime, wars/terrorist acts, natural disasters, and more;

• demonstrate bias and exclusion in institutional collecting and digitization policies.

The archivists choose what language to use when describing materials. The archivists choose to utilize terms and descriptions that to the best of their knowledge reflect self-identifying terms. The archivists may re-use language provided by creators or former owners of the material to provide important context, but it can also reflect biases and prejudices.

 We hope to properly inform users about the presence and origin of harmful content, supplement harmful descriptions with more respectful terms, create new standardized terms to describe materials, research the issue, listen to users, evaluate existing processes of exclusion and institutional bias within the archives field, and make a commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.

Please note: Reporting potentially harmful language in archival descriptions only applies to language found within the archival descriptions of the records, not to the content of the original historical records. We cannot alter the content of the original record.

You can help us by reporting potentially harmful language that you see in archival descriptions to this email milandchanges-requests@umich.edu and include:

• the title of the description

• a quote of the specific language you feel is harmful

• a suggested alternative if you have one 

The Michigan Land Changes archival group will determine whether we will change or remove terms from archival descriptions. We will weigh the potential harm against considerations such as input from affected communities, accurate preservation of the historical record, professional best practices, and allocation of group resources.