by Krista McCracken
In May as part of the Archives Association of Ontario conference I was able to participate in a workshop on Anti-Oppressive Description and Re-Description Workshop. Facilitated by Aaron Hope, Catherine Falls, Renee Saucier, and Danielle Robichaud, this workshop discussed records which contain racist, sexist or other discriminatory content and potential ways archivists can call out problematic materials in archives.
I’m really grateful for the space this workshop provided to dig into archival challenges and share ongoing work around re-description. In archival practice typically archival materials are only described once. This means that records researchers encounter may have been described decades ago by a staff member. Language changes and how we interact with and interpret records can also change. Archival re-description has become a more common practice.
Likewise, there has been a growing practice of archivists calling out racism in their records and acknowledging the potential harm of historical racist language. This sometimes looks like including content warnings about racial slurs, notes about blackface, or similar contextual notes. It can also look like new descriptive notes or new titles being added to existing records, to fill in contextual information that may have been missing from the original description. For example, records that were labeled as “John Smith and Wife” may have a new description added reading “John Smith and Jane Smith.” Continue reading
In the decade following the Second World War, the population of Toronto doubled, in large part because of a steady influx of immigrants. By 1971, the population doubled again to over 2 million, causing the city to expand geographically as the agricultural fields that surrounded the downtown core became part of the urban sprawl. Central to this was the expansion of the subway, near which developers to built high-rises, thus allowing more people to live within walking distance of mass transit. With immigrants from around the world looking for housing on arrival in Canada, these communities were diverse and held up as examples of Canada’s multiculturalism policy put forth by the Pierre Trudeau government.
I’m one who believes that, at its core, history is about storytelling. Historians tell the stories of those who came before – and the best historians do so in a way that is both engaging and meaningful to the audience. For some, that has included telling their own stories and using their life experiences to illuminate larger trends and offer a window into specific times and places.
