**Giorgia Gakas **is Digitisation Lead, Neil Campbell Digitisation Centre, at Monash University Library. They recently attended the 2025 ASA Annual Conference with support from the DPC Career Development Fund, which is funded by DPC Supporters.

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Monash University Library Clayton campus rests on the traditional lands of the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation, the Traditional Custodians and owners of the lands where our teams work, facilities are located and the Digitisation Centre operates.

I support Monash University Library’s commitment to Indigenous self-determination and well-being by working to improve cultural safety for First Nations researchers, community members and colleagues. The Library is dedicated to decolonising collections, showcasing First Nations voices, and providing respectful, safe access to resources.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and all First Nations peoples, should be aware that this blog may contain names, stories, themes and references of deceased persons and cultural knowledges that may be potentially sensitive.

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Before attending the 2025 Australian Society of Archivists (ASA) ‘Telling Our Stories’ Conference, I revisited a 2020 CRKN Virtual Conference presentation by Deborah Lee and Rebecca Dickson (COPPUL). Their session, Indigenous Perspectives on Library and Archival Digital Preservation Practices, drew on Dr. Kimberly Christen’s work, which highlights the colonial, extractive practices present in current digital preservation and “discovery” work undertaken by archives:

“Even detailed workflows all start with finding or getting content. The workflows suggest a process that begins with the notion of discovery that replays a colonial collecting paradigm, where content is imagined as unhinged from people and cultures and free for the taking.” (Christen, 2018, p.45)

This informed how I entered the ASA conference - as a non-Indigenous practitioner working within systems, frameworks, vocabularies and knowledges that have inherited these foundations.

The conference’s opening keynote by Gailyn Lehuanani Bopp, a Kānaka Maoli woman from O’ahu in the Hawaiian archipelago and University Archivist and Assistant Professor of Theatre in the Faculty of Culture, Language, and Performing Arts at Brigham Young University - Hawai’i, was profoundly grounding. Her presentation, Na wai e ho‘ōla i nā iwi? / Who Will Make the Bones Live?: Informing Archival Practice Through Hawaiian Cultural Principles, Practices, and Protocol, reframed archival work as relational, embodied, and accountable.

Gailyn spoke about waiwai (value), mana (spirit, authority), and the concept of Eia Hawai‘i – “Embodiment of Ways”, where person and place are inseparable. Gailyn made clear that archival materials– particularly cultural materials– are not passive holdings; they are kin, carrying lineages of responsibility and spirit.

She asked a question that has stayed with me:

Why are archivists, librarians, and digital practitioners so determined to “make archives [files] live” when our methods can flatten the very voices and knowledge systems we think we are preserving?

To illustrate this, Gailyn discussed oral histories recorded by colonial researchers and academics. The resulting recordings were shaped to fit Western expectations of knowledge– producing altered representations, much like AI does when it reproduces a version of voice through its own lens. When Gailyn listened to the recording of her own grandmother, she said:

“I couldn’t see her, feel her, hear her”.

What remained in the archive was an altered response– an academic artefact, not her ancestor’s voice–preserved in perpetuity.

Gailyn’s teaching that “the essence of person echoes in objects”—that materials hold mana, carry responsibility and spirit—forced me to think critically about the language of “file transfer,” “fixity,” and “preservation files”. If our work reduces “spirit” to a checksum, what is lost? Who does it serve? What responsibilities do we ignore?

This keynote resonated strongly with another line from the conference, offered in the keynote by Dr Jacinta Walsh, Lecturer / Indigenous Research Fellow, at Monash University, in her presentation The Ceremony of Kinship: What we do not heal in our lifetimes, future generations must heal. She said:

“We are not fighting for access to something that is not ours. Data has spirit. Our records are family. Those are ours, we are calling them home.”

Dr Walsh spoke to the themes of suppressed separateness, living between worlds, and archives as songlines– places where relationships live, not neutral containers. Her framing of records as kin, not capital, echoed directly with Gailyn’s emphasis on relational accountability.

Gailyn also addressed iwi kūpuna—ancestral remains—and the principles of care that guide their handling:

• Eia Hawai‘i – person is place, place is person
• Story / Silence / Sharing / Sorrow
• Culturally informed relationships
• Feeling deeply and caring responsibly
• Mana: “there is spirit and life”
• Uwē: veneration of connection

She described the “Story of X” at BYU-Hawai’i before her tenure: iwi Kūpuna “discovered” on a beach, stored in a closet, then displayed in a Reading Room as “a fully articulated skeleton” for students. These ancestors were finally laid to rest in February 2025 with dignity and ceremony.

Her message was clear: “their living is not in display, but in dignity - let the bones live.”

Other sessions at the conference strengthened these threads:

Dr Kath Apma Penangke Travis, a Sovereign Arrernte and Boandik woman, Stolen Generation survivor and archive user, confronted the trauma resulting from access or lack thereof to archives which are spaces of truth-telling for Stolen Generations survivors, not neutral repositories.

Dr Kirsten Thorpe, (Worimi, Port Stephens), Associate Professor and Chancellor’s Indigenous Research Fellow at Jumbunna Institute, UTS, highlighted the absence of professional development pathways for First Nations archivists and reality that archives can be “places of sorry business”.

A presentation from the Aboriginal History Archive (AHA) at Victoria University demonstrated self-determination in action, embedding community control, Indigenous data sovereignty, and governance in every step of archival work. They also deliberately build pipelines for young Indigenous archivists, exemplified by this year’s AHA intern Taylah Austen, who highlighted the importance of Indigenous leadership in every task, from appraisal to access. Taylah Austen is a Gunggari and Kamilaroi woman. She is currently undertaking a Bachelor of Arts in History and Indigenous Studies at Victoria University. Taylah has a history of Indigenous Rights and Feminist activism in Naarm.

The AI and ethics panel further stressed the need for community presence in all decision-making. Dr Monica Galassi (Research Fellow at Jumbunna Institute Research, UTS) asked:

“What does the community need—and why don’t we digitise what they want?”

Her reflections on decontextualised records and automated decisions without community presence reinforced the central message of the conference: process without relationship is not care.

Yet, throughout the conference, it was Gailyn’s keynote that remained the thematic centre for me. Her message translates directly into digital preservation work: our task is not simply to “make files live,” but to ensure that our methods, systems, and decisions do not strip life, context, or sovereignty from the communities to whom the records belong.

References:

Christen, K. (2018). Relationships, Not Records. In J. Sayers (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities (1st ed., pp. 403–412). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315730479-42

**Acknowledgements **

The Career Development Fund is sponsored by the DPC’s Supporters who recognize the benefit and seek to support a connected and trained digital preservation workforce. We gratefully acknowledge their financial support to this programme and ask applicants to acknowledge that support in any communications that result. At the time of writing, the Career Development Fund is supported by Arkivum, Artefactual Systems Inc., boxxe, Cerabyte, DAMsmart, Evolved Binary, Ex Libris, HoloMem, Iron Mountain, Libnova, Max Communications, Pictoscope, Preferred Media, Preservica and Simon P Wilson. A full list of supporters is online here.