Archives & Manuscripts

Editorial

2026-09-14T20:28:25+00:00

Guest Editorial

2026-09-14T20:28:56+00:00

On the Tandanya-Adelaide Declaration: ‘Reach, Relevance and Implementation’

2026-09-14T20:31:03+00:00

I begin this discussion on the making, meaning, and reception of the Tandanya-Adelaide Declaration with deep humility and respect for the experiences of the Survivors of the Canadian national residential school programme. The history and legacy of residential schools represent a painful and unresolved chapter in the shared history of Indigenous peoples and settler society in the country where I live. I write in support of the rights, dignity, and well-being of Inuit, First Nations, and Métis peoples across Turtle Island. That their experiences of childhood deprivation, incarceration, abuse, and loss, will be respectfully remembered and learned from; that this remembrance promotes healing, confronts deniability, supports Indigenous rights and reparations, and gives reason for the sovereignty and self-determination of Inuit, First Nations, and Métis peoples.

Indigenous Archival Futures and the International Council on Archives Tandanya-Adelaide Declaration: Indigenous Perspectives from Australia

2026-09-14T20:31:41+00:00

2024 marked the 5th anniversary of the Tandanya-Adelaide Declaration, a critical milestone in the international archival community's commitment to transform archives by centring Indigenous leadership, self-determination and knowledge systems. This paper introduces and discusses the collaborative Australia-based research project Tracking Tandanya, launched in 2024 through a partnership between the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research at the University of Technology Sydney, the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University, and the Australian Society of Archivists. The Tracking Tandanya project evaluates how the Declaration is advancing its aim of transforming archives to support Indigenous priorities, drawing on research data collected through a sector-wide survey of individuals and organisations engaging with, or implementing, the Declaration across Australia. Tracking Tandanya seeks to answer questions including: How is the Declaration being utilised in institutional contexts? Are projects being adequately resourced and evaluated? Are the reforms making an impact on community? Have archival practices begun to be reimagined? What are the trends from the Declaration’s themes that are being addressed? By establishing this evidence base, the project aims to identify both strengths and areas for improvement in supporting Indigenous self-determination in archives.

Wilful Ignorance, Invisibilisation and Coloniality: A Pacific Practitioner’s Reflection on the Tandanya-Adelaide Declaration

2026-09-15T10:33:07+00:00

This reflection critiques the Tandanya-Adelaide Declaration from a Pacific practitioner’s perspective, exposing how coloniality persists through exclusion, silencing, and symbolic extraction. It situates the Declaration within a broader pattern of wilful ignorance and invisibilisation that has long undermined Pacific recordkeeping and information governance. Drawing on lived experience and regional data gaps, it links archival neglect to human harm, gendered devaluation, and weakened regional solidarity. Ultimately, it argues that true decolonisation requires rebuilding Pacific-led recordkeeping systems and restoring genuine partnerships, where solidarity is measured not by rhetoric but by whether the systems we create safeguard Pacific lives and dignity.

The Powerhouse & Blak Collections: Sitting with Trouble and Standing Up for Truth

2026-09-14T20:33:31+00:00

The Tandanya-Adelaide Declaration came to the Powerhouse Museum in late 2019 and has underpinned sincere positive transformation of collection care standards ever since. Enacting its commitments allowed unprecedented Indigenous accesses and advances through the historic Powerhouse Collection Digitisation and Relocation Project, which further informed the founding of the Powerhouse First Nations Directorate in 2021. Since then, many profound improvements are being enabled by fulfilling the assertions and commitments offered in the Tandanya-Adelaide Declaration. This article is presented as a firsthand account of how it has informed positive developments in documentation, storage, handling and access as well as towards correct recognitions, protocol adherences and approaches to acquisition all of which affirm the rights of Indigenous people over their cultural heritage that the Powerhouse is safeguarding.

The Long Road to Self-Determination

2026-09-14T20:35:08+00:00

This reflective essay considers how Queensland State Archives has responded to the Tandanya-Adelaide Declaration since 2021. It weaves institutional reform with lived experience to examine recognition, access, and the challenges of knowledge authority, ownership and self-determination. Examples include projects such as ‘Mob on Mondays’, the First Nations Language Program, and the development of Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property protocols. The essay reflects on personal files and surveillance, and on archives as both sites of harm and healing. It argues that truth-telling and cultural authority must guide archival practice, and that self-determination is an ongoing, relational commitment rather than a destination.

Reflections on Creative Responses to Archival Collections in PARADISEC

2026-09-14T20:35:28+00:00

The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) is a digital archive of some of the many small cultures and languages of the world, particularly from the Pacific region. The article reflects on a collaborative outreach project involving the creative response of a group of Papua New Guinean people to archival collections held in PARADISEC. The project demonstrates how reciprocity, long-term relationships and the valuing of Indigenous knowledge holders can invigorate cultural practices, adding value and meaning to the archive. This connects to the Tandanya-Adelaide Declaration themes and contributes to an ethical space of engagement, encounter, respect, negotiation and collaboration.

Implementing the Tandanya-Adelaide Declaration at the Australian War Memorial

2026-09-14T20:35:56+00:00

The archives of the Australian War Memorial (herein referred to as the Memorial) were established in 1917 with a national aim – to preserve as ‘sacred things’¹ the records made by the Australian Imperial Force in the war of 1914–1918. Over time, the Memorial and its archives have expanded to include Australia’s involvement in earlier British Imperial wars to recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and peacekeeping and humanitarian operations; however, the Memorial resisted, amidst intense national debate, the 40-year call for extensive coverage of the wars on Australian soil, by which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were violently displaced and colonised and the nation state of Australia was formed.

In September 2022, it was announced that the Memorial’s Council had made the decision that there would be ‘a much broader, a much deeper depiction and presentation of the violence committed against Indigenous people’,² and in February 2023, it was confirmed that the Memorial would have ‘a proper recognition of the frontier conflict’ in its galleries.³ This is an important endeavour that requires unwavering implementation of research and curatorial best practice in relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ knowledges, cultural material, intellectual property, and experiences of war, violence, discrimination and trauma.

As the Memorial seeks to open and develop its archives to support its forthcoming truth-telling, Memorial curators are working to implement the Tandanya-Adelaide Declaration (2019) (herein referred to as the Declaration) and Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property protocols to establish ‘an ethical space of encounter, respect, negotiation and collaboration’.

A Reflection from the Digital Preservation Coalition on Implementing the Tandanya Declaration in the Rapid Assessment Model

2026-09-14T20:36:40+00:00

The Tandanya-Adelaide Declaration provided important guidance to the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) in the latest revision of the DPC Rapid Assessment model (DPC RAM). The DPC is a collaborative global charity whose members work together to bring about a sustainable future for digital assets. One of its key resources is a maturity modelling tool for digital preservation – the RAM. This reflection explains how elements of the Tandanya-Adelaide Declaration were incorporated into the latest version of the DPC RAM and led to the DPC centring and promoting a more ethical approach to digital preservation within RAM.

Teaching Tandanya in Palestine and Lebanon: Liberatory Pedagogy for Archival Sovereignty

2026-09-15T12:47:18+00:00

This article discusses how The Adelaide-Tandanya Declaration has been incorporated as a pedagogical tool within the training components of the project, Fighting Erasure: Digitizing Gaza’s Genocide & the War on Lebanon, a collaborative archival initiative delivering emergency mitigation and digitization training to heritage stewards and information professionals focused on Palestine and Lebanon against the backdrop of expanding genocide and settler colonialism. Grounded in bell hooks’ pedagogy of hope and decolonial archival praxis, the authors explain how The Declaration’s insistence on indigenous archival sovereignty opened space to teach eurocentric archival standards and practices otherwise – critically, openly, and less oppressively. The article situates the course within broader struggles for archival sovereignty and liberatory pedagogy, outlining how the curriculum integrates foundational archival practices – on description, digitization, and emergency mitigation – with critical approaches that foreground community knowledge, anti-colonial frameworks, and principles of stewardship. Drawing on experiences from multiple rounds of training, the authors reflect on the challenges of translating and teaching archival standards, methods, and practices across linguistic, cultural, and political contexts while resisting the eurocentric assumptions embedded in archival science. Particular attention is given to the role of collective learning, translation, and contextualization in shaping an approach to archival education rooted in solidarity and resistance. The article further reflects on the challenges, contradictions, and possibilities of teaching for liberation in active war zones and argues that teaching archival practice in contexts of crisis can function as a form of community defense, supporting local actors in safeguarding memory, asserting narrative authority, and mobilizing archives as tools for justice and liberation.