In considering the ASA 2022 theme ‘here we are’ we describe the constituent elements of the Wangka Maya archive and the unique socio-cultural environment which it operates in. We answer the question ‘what is the Wangka Maya archive as an archive of an Indigenous Organisation?’ by demonstrating how embeddedness on Country supports contextualisation of archival material.
Wangka Maya Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre was established in 1989 in Port Hedland, on Kariyarra Country, following a few years of intensive work recording language and stories by Aboriginal community members. Wangka Maya is funded mostly by the Commonwealth government Indigenous Languages and Arts program. The Wangka Maya membership is made up of Aboriginal people who live in the Pilbara, many speak Pilbara Aboriginal languages, alongside English. The organisation is governed by a board nominated annually by the membership. Most of the thirty-one Pilbara languages are in a state of severe or extreme endangerment with less than twenty people currently speaking them.
Wangka Maya’s collection started with a collation of existing material of Pilbara languages and historical material attributed to non-Aboriginal linguists. As extensive language recording and resource production got underway by Wangka Maya Aboriginal language workers, linguists and community members the Wangka Maya archive rapidly grew to the largest collection of Pilbara Aboriginal linguistic and cultural material. The Wangka Maya archive has been maintained in-house for the past thirty-five years meeting challenges due to its remote location and extreme climatic conditions.
For this talk we have chosen to look at the central elements that make up the Wangka Maya archive and its operation. Central to the Wangka Maya archive is Country as place, and as archive, encompassing local diplomacy. Within Country lies the materiality of the archive, the objects and their content which are held within Wangka Maya. An astounding amount of this material has been created as part of Wangka Maya’s members’ own work and remains at Wangka Maya. Relationships with other archives and collectors maintain external material that is post-custodial, often partial and fragmented, and sometimes yet to be identified. Evolution of the archive has spanned the transition from analogue to digital. Language documentation and resource production workflows greatly increased in productivity with digital tools, however, like all archives, Wangka Maya now faces challenges of digital storage and preservation. Unrealistic expectations of technology as a remedy to rapid language shifts detract from the agency and knowledge of people to maintain their languages in and as Country. Rather than the structured metadata of an archival system it is people who use, maintain, and contextualise the archive and archival material within and as their socio-cultural practices in place. The loose and minimal metadata settings of the systems that represent the collection and a small set of simple written technical procedures support the socio-technical archival context which is governed by local cultural protocols. People use their linguistic, local, cultural, and historical knowledge to enact memory work and collective action within the archival space.