Collaboration Recommendations

After I’d done my due diligence researching Salvador, Kodiak Island, the Aluutiq people, the history of salmon canneries in America and a few tangents around the advent of affordable, handheld cameras and a series of Anti-Filipino bombings that took place across the West coast in 1930, I was able to get a draft of the work together. Whenever I am working on a piece detailing the history of a community I am not a part of, I always make sure to incorporate the words of someone who is a part of the community and share working drafts with them to make sure I’ve got the details, and importantly, the tone of the retelling correct.

A group of cannery workers smiling on a stairwell besides a bunkhouse. — Albert, Nick, Zoe, Flo (as written on the back of the item), Kodiak Island, Alaska, ca. 1938. Photograph by Salvador Caballero, courtesy of FANHS.

Reciprocity

Another thing I would recommend as a cultural outsider collaborating with community archives is to emphasize what you can provide to them in exchange for access to these materials. In this case, the return was around 200 digital images of this scrapbook (that they could possibly implement as user copies, if they chose to, thereby mitigating future deterioration of the scrapbook) and an article that attributes them by name and highlights their dedication to preserving cultural history, which they can point towards during future fundraising campaigns and ease day to day operations.

Unsolicited Advice

While I was surprised that patrons could take items away from the archive, I didn’t vocalize it and I didn’t make any unsolicited suggestions. I’ve been on this earth as long as the archive has been operational and a White person providing unsolicited advice on another community’s practices could feel condescending on many levels and convey a message to the community archivist that the outsider might not be intending. If they would like my advice, I will let them ask me.

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Two children in work clothes and rubber boots smile and hold salmon in their hands while wading in a creek. — Alutiiq children fishing salmon from the Karluck River, Kodiak Island, Alaska, ca. 1938. Photograph by Salvador Caballero, courtesy of FANHS.

Advantages of Community Archives

Though informal, these community archives serve a function that larger, more regimented institutions cannot. Many of the personal collections of working class people housed in FAHNS would likely be deemed to not be historically significant enough to preserve. Equally, members of that community might not be comfortable donating their records to an institution they don’t trust. Additionally, if a community archive were to donate their whole collection to say, the University of Washington, it might be years before the collections are catalog, much less digitized, making these important cultural records completely inaccessible to their community. Instead, mutual support between institutional and community archives is key for reaching the shared goal of preserved cultural heritage.

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Conclusion

The experience was an excellent primer on being mindful of your own bias as a librarian before entering a community archive space. Things will look and function differently than what you are used to and it isn’t necessarily right or wrong, they simply are. We can tut at the missing images in the scrapbook, but the fact that it has been preserved at all is due completely to forty years of underfunded commitment on the part of the Filipino American National Historic Society and community archives like it.

Thank you for your time.