Documentary Focus

The documentary focus of our archive is women, female-identifying, transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people recreating and working on United States federal lands, primarily national parks and monuments.  These groups tend to be underrepresented in archives and images of outdoor recreation, and our purpose is to collect documentation of their existence on public lands.  Our archive is image-centric and largely contains photographs along with a few videos and related documents.  We aimed to collect images showing a diverse range of subjects and time periods, to present a full picture of womens’ presence on national park lands.  We also wanted to acknowledge and incorporate records of indigenous women whose ancestral homelands overlap with contemporary national park lands.  Our records are for the most part limited to resources already accessible in various online archives.

Consideration for Archival Practice

The metadata in this archive will often present varied levels of detail and may present different names for different subjects in the title fields, though they will remain consistent in the subject field. This can allow users to approach records which may carry different names while also maintaining provenance with the digital collections where the records originated to make finding the original records and their record holders easier. 

This archive has largely left the record information unchanged from the source information, though some additional fields, such as “Traditional Landholders” have been added and some additional context may be found in the “Description” field as well, in an attempt to honor the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials (1) where possible considering the scope of our topic and limitations of time and resources. Records in this archive utilize a widely accepted digital metadata format in Dublin Core, which should make searching between objects and institutions easier for users. 

This, alongside the restrictions of Omeka, however, do limit flexibility and a user’s ability to edit records directly. We have placed forms in our Navigation bar, including a “Submit to the Archive” and “Community Feedback” form, which allow users to send us comments regarding changes that need to be made that can support the “tellings and re-tellings of competing stories” (2). We will endeavor to address all comments as expediently as possible. 

As mentioned, our archive also does not include large amounts of contextual metadata, though it does leave room for this information to be added into the “Description” section of the record or included in object tags. Records that may require additional context or potential content warnings have been included where needed. 

While not an inherent part of the technology, Omeka’s position as a tool used by large institutions, educators, and universities also adds to the conversation Duff and Harris surface around degrading provenance. They write that “multi-faceted aspects of provenance are eroded when archival practice dictates the creation of fonds-level description and credits the creation of the records (and thus provenance) to one, and only one, individual or organization” (2).

In a case like ours, where our archive is creating new methods of description and relation for records already found in other archives, we acknowledge that while “most retention/appraisal/acquisition decisions are made without ready access to … what use is made  of  the  records  in  other  settings, and the extent to which this retention and use elsewhere might warrant  the destruction of records in a similar setting” (3). We hope that this archive with its community features might be a place to expand, reinforce, or challenge the narratives present in the archives we borrow from. 
 

Criteria for Record Selection

Our record selection process by began dividing up the U.S. into the different regions of federal land. Since we were working across the U.S. and its federally recognized territories, we were confined to working with already digitized archives. The amount of and diversity of records differed by park, and by region. We wanted to ensure representation across the different park regions, so we looked for records from each major national park, or for some regions, each state. To locate archival material, we looked at the National Park Service’s History Collection, and large collection of existing digitized records. When this proved to be insufficient, we then looked to close by universities’ special collections, local libraries, or even local archives that might already have digitized documents ready for use.

In selecting these archives, we had a few parameters that defined our record selection. In looking to alleviate the gap of women shown using federal land throughout history, we first and foremost looked for female presenting individuals in the photos. The prominence of the individuals was significant,  as we wanted to highlight the agency of the people shown. As our goal was to highlight women’s instrumental role engaging with the federal land, making sure the women we were selecting and representing were prominent was of first order. Furthermore, we tried to collect a broad swath of time, so looking for images from early park history and less represented time periods was also a goal we used in our collection.

Furthermore, the identities of the female-presenting individuals was also important. Insuring that indigenous groups were represented as original stewards of the land was significant. When possible, we also made sure to include women of color, who have routinely been left out of the conversation of people recreating and working on federal land. In short, our record collection was proactive, with the general aim of giving representation back to a diverse range of subjects, activities, and time periods in order to reflect womens' existence in all its fullness.

Target Audience

Our site is primarily targeted towards female-identifying individuals who are interested in travel and outdoor recreation, no matter their expertise in outdoors skills. Additional audiences include individuals interested in travel and outdoor recreation regardless of their gender,  families who are traveling to/interested in national parks, and teachers at the elementary and secondary levels. 

Our site is designed with our target audience in mind. We hope you find the site's images and layout to be engaging and comprehensible, allowing you and your younger family members or students to explore the site comfortably and easily (4).  By allowing for submissions and community feedback, we hope to evoke personal ties to the content (5) and create an affirming digital space for our users (6).

Perspectives

This archive strives to include a diverse array of perspectives relative to the National Parks and their long, complex history. Women have had a wide array of experiences relative to the lands on which the National Parks were founded, though they are not typically associated with the history of the national parks. Instead, figures like Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and Woodrow Wilson dominate the narrative. They have been staff, visitors, indigenous landholders and caretakers, people of color, activists, artists, family members, concerned citizens, students, pioneers, and explorers. This collection includes records that depict all of these. White women have made huge strides in the past several decades in terms of being visible in outdoor spaces, especially through social media platforms such as Instagram. There is a long way to go, however, until the cultural norm includes Indigenous and women of color in outdoor recreation spaces. This fact is especially disappointing considering Indigenous peoples are the original stewards of the land that is now owned by the federal government and used for recreation by primarily white users. Considering these cultural contexts, we have selected records that represent a diverse group of individuals, but it is in no way complete.

Many of the women in these photos cannot be identified or are now deceased, and as a result can’t be contacted to gain other information about the content of these records or their inclusion in our archive. While they are all publicly accessible through archives, libraries, and federal groups like the National Park Service and National Archives, we have not been able to reach out to the women or their families individually. These records are often placed in the public domain by default, which does little to give indigenous people the right to be forgotten. As Ghaddar points out, we run the risk of turning these subjects into “objects whose differences and particularities are to be mapped, charted, and described” (7). This is far from our intent and if any of the subjects present in the record who are unidentified are interested in submitting feedback, removing their images, or adding further contributions, all of this can be done through our collecting forms. In line with Iacovino’s work, this archive and its creators aim to operate on the principle of “record subject as a record co-creator” (8) and the wishes of the subject will come first.

While we have included the names of indigenous peoples who occupied each area, as well as their original names for some of these areas, this archive was not created with individuals from these tribes and it is likely that there were groups who moved through these lands at various times who we have not listed in our record. Many images may not necessarily identify the specific tribe or nation each subject is a part of, and the scope of our project made it too difficult to reach out to all of the tribes that may be included across the nation within one semester, as outlined by the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials, though this would be of interest in the future if we were able. In line with these principles, we have removed culturally sensitive materials, added additional context where needed, created areas for users to submit feedback and contribute to the archive, and included the names of the tribes and in some cases what they called these lands on every item. The National Parks, although deemed natural wonders, have been “preserved” at the expense of many of these tribes who inhabited these lands and their stories erased by white, colonial powers within the United States. Their stories are vital to our growing understanding of the land the parks encompass and this archive can only benefit from more of their stories. In future, we hope to be more active in reaching out to indigenous groups around the country who can add new perspectives to our archive.

This archive is titled “Women in National Parks,” but it is important to remember that for many of these records, we are not able to confirm the gender of the subjects within them. Assuming gender leaves the potential to misidentify or exclude individuals, something we want to avoid at all costs. Particularly with images in the past, not acknowledging this issue can reinforce the belief that gender-nonconforming people are a new phenomenon, which is not the case. Our archive seeks to be inclusive of transgender, non-binary, two-spirit, and gender-nonconforming people, as well as those who identify as women, but given our current limitations, this is not currently information we are able to provide about the subjects in our records. Pronouns or other information related to identity can be included in the “Subject” field either in parentheses after the subjects name or alone for the purpose of anonymity.

Unfortunately, in its current iteration, our archive is not set up to account for the needs of many disability users, including tackling issues of mobility, visual impairment, or hearing impairment. In future, we would like to work on adding alt text within a description field.

We want to ensure that this archive can be a place where these complexities, experiences, and buried histories can be seen and where the diverse community tied to the parks can add to and shape this narrative. Users of this archive can submit their own records for inclusion using our “Submit to the Archive” form, add tags to content, and submit feedback to our “Community Feedback” form if there are questions, concerns, or revisions they want taken into account in the archive.

Citations

(1) Northern Arizona University. (2007, April 9). Protocols for Native American Archival Materials. NAU.edu. https://www2.nau.edu/libnap-p/resources.html

(2) Duff, W. M., Harris, V. (2002). Stories and Names: Archival Description as Narrating Records and Constructing Meanings. Archival Science, 2(3–4), 263–85.

(3) Hackman, L., Warnow-Blewett, J.  (January 1, 1987). The Documentation Strategy Process: A Model and a Case Study. The American Archivist, 50(1), 12–47.

(4) Garcia, P. (2017). Accessing archives: Teaching with primary sources in K–12 classrooms. The American Archivist, 80(1), 189-212. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.80.1.189

(5) Yakel, E. & Torres, D. A. (2007). Genealogists as a "community of records". The American Archivist, 70(1), 93-113. https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.70.1.ll5414u736440636 

(6) Wakimoto, D. K., Bruce, C., & Partridge, H. (2013). Archivist as activist: Lessons from three queer community archives in California. Archival Science, 13(4), 293-316. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-013-9201-1

(7) Ghaddar, J. J. (2016). The spectre in the archive: Truth, reconciliation, and indigenous archival memory. Archivaria, 82(1), 3-26.

(8) Iacovino, L. (2010). Rethinking Archival, Ethical and Legal Frameworks for Records of Indigenous Australian Communities: A Participant Relationship Model of Rights and Responsibilities. Archival Science, 10, 353–72.