Abstract
Increasing interest amongst archivists in the history of records and archives leads to questions about how this historical knowledge may affect archival theory and practice. This article discusses its effect on the concept of provenance by suggesting that it indicates that records have what might be called a societal provenance. The article discusses some of the principal features of societal provenance and some implications for archival theory and practice of this concept. The article provides examples of the place of societal provenance in understanding Aboriginal-Euro-Canadian records by using the 1802–1803 birchbark journal of fur trader Jean Steinbruck, which has a provenance in fur trade society in northwestern Canada, and photographs from the late nineteeth century, which reflect a provenance in the new agrarian and urban society that ended fur trade society in the Canadian West.
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Notes
Kern (2004, pp. 4, 6).
Gary Urton, professor of pre-Columbian studies at Harvard, notes that the Spanish conquerors of South America acquired much information about their new possessions from the indigenous keepers of the khipu records—the records made by fashioning certain knots in string. Urton says, “There was a tremendous amount of production of documents on administrative matters in the early Spanish colonial state in Peru. And the main source of information for Spaniards as they set up a colonial empire was the khipu keepers, whom they would call in and say, ‘Read me the information off your khipu.’” National Post (30 June 2003), p. A10. For a more extended treatment of this theme, see Canizares-Esguerra (2001, pp. 88–92). For the British example in India of similar activities see, Bayly (1996). For Aboriginal mapping in Canada, see Binnema (2001); for a related study of Aboriginal mapping, see Podolsky Nordland. For more general Aboriginal contributions to European mapping of Canada, see Morantz (2002, pp. 24–41). For Aboriginal weather information in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s archival records see Houston et al. (2003, pp. 122–123). It is particularly noteworthy here that Europeans highlighted the views of older Aboriginals when trying to acquire information from the Aboriginal archive on long-term weather conditions. For Aboriginal medical information, see Dickason (2002, p. 25). Dickason, alluding here to its archival dimensions, says “that this knowledge went deep into the past is not questioned.” Dickason also notes that Aboriginal people were selective in passing on their archive of information (pp. 64, 444). For nineteenth-century photography and Aboriginal people in Western Canada, see Williams (2003). The Australian and New Zealand archival communities have entered into discussion of the ownership and access issues involved in recognizing the existence of Aboriginal knowledge in government records; see Jacobs and Falconer (2003) and Toon (2003).
The North West Company, based in Montreal, was one of the two principal rival fur trading companies in northern North America during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It merged with its rival, the London-based Hudson’s Bay Company, in 1821. For a full-colour reproduction of the entire journal, a transcript of its entries, and a brief introduction to the early history of the fur trade in the northwest, see Duckworth (1999). The journal is now at the Northwest Territories Archives at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. See http://pwnhc.learnnet.nt.ca/exhibits/nv/ykfort.htm. For its use in public programming for school children, see http://pwnhc.learnnet.nt.ca/teach/schoolprgrm.htm#Fur.
Duckworth (1999, pp. 5, 19, 21).
Duckworth (1999, pp. 27, 49) and passim.
Interestingly, although he does not pursue these identity questions, Harry Duckworth, the author of the published reproduction of the journal, calls it “the Yellowknife journal” by Steinbruck (implying its societal character), and not simply the Steinbruck journal. See Duckworth (1999). And the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife calls it “the Yellow Knife Fort Journal.” See http://pwnhc.learnnet.nt.ca/exhibits/nv/ykfort.htm.
Dickason (2002, p. 222).
Dickason (2002, p. 222); see also Russell (1984), Bracken (1997), Hubner (2000), and Darcy (2004). The renewed value now being accorded by some to the traditional Aboriginal archive can be seen in the administration of the polar bear hunt in the northern Canadian territory of Nunavut. Nunavut’s Minister of Environment, Olayuk Akesuk, says that Inuit oral history of past hunts and conditions shaped a recent government decision on the hunt quota. “As we all know,” he says, “we Inuit have been living here for thousands of years and people have talked, our elders have talked to us and other communities. The hunters have been involved in some researches. It’s more a knowledge that we’ve taken from the past.” McGill University professor George Wenzel comments on this traditional knowledge that the Inuit “know better than any southern scientists simply because they spend so much more time in that environment.” See National Post (12 January 2005), p. A5.
Williams (2003, pp. 83–84, 142–143).
McMaster (1992).
This photograph is one of a series of McGill University football team photographs featured in the virtual exhibit mounted by the McGill University Archives entitled “McGill Football Photo Gallery: Football at McGill, 1874–2000” (see www.archives.mcgill.ca/public/exhibits/football/index.htm). For a similar example, see the photograph of the 1888 Victoria Hockey Club of Montreal in Hall et al. (1993, p. 67).
For more on such readings of the material features of records, or “material literacy,” see Rekrut (2005).
For a further discussion of the multiple provenance of a record in such a process (using a Canadian Aboriginal example), see Podolsky Nordland (2004).
Kern (2004, pp. 9, 12).
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This article is the published version of a paper presented on 2 September 2005 at ICHORA 2: The Second International Conference on the History of Records and Archives at the University of Amsterdam. The word Aboriginal is widely used in Canada to refer to the country’s first inhabitants and their descendants. Although the word may have other meanings elsewhere, it is used in the Canadian sense in this article.
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Nesmith, T. The concept of societal provenance and records of nineteenth-century Aboriginal–European relations in Western Canada: implications for archival theory and practice. Arch Sci 6, 351–360 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-007-9043-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-007-9043-9