Franny Gaede (she/her/hers) is the Director of Digital Scholarship Services at the University of Oregon. She provides leadership and support for digital scholarship in teaching and research, digital collections, digital preservation, scholarly communication, and library-led open access publishing.
Dr. Ana-Maurine Lara is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at University of Oregon. An award winning novelist, poet, and academic writer, her most recent books are Konjher Woman, Streetwalking: LGBT Lives and Protest in the Dominican Republic and Queer Freedom, Black Sovereignty.
Dr. Alai Reyes-Santos is an independent scholar currently serving as the Associate Director of the Mellon-funded PNW Just Futures Institute for Racial and Climate Justice; a Professor of Practice at the University of Oregon School of Law; and a consultant on equity, and social and environmental justice. www.alaireyessantos.com
Kate Thornhill (she/her/hers) is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at the University of Oregon. Since 2013, her focus has been on developing and sustaining digital services as a hybrid librarian, archivist, and web technologist specializing in digital stewardship, digital repositories, and digital humanities research and classroom projects.
This is the source
This interdisciplinary team placed the healers’ community at the center of the research project to publicly validate and share aspects of their knowledge with the healers, teachers, researchers, and students studying race, indigeneity, ethnobotanical medicinal healing, and intersectionality.
In 2016, after four years of meeting and spending time with Caribbean women that keep
their Afro-Indigenous, Indigenous and Afro-descendant healing traditions alive,
Reyes-Santos and Lara were inspired to conceptualize a project that validates
healers’ knowledge in a world where Eurocentric notions of health and medicine vilify
and dismiss them. As healers and ceremonialists, themselves, Reyes-Santos and Lara’s
journeys within Caribbean communities throughout the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto
Rico, and the U.S. Pacific Northwest region, seeks to interrogate and to interrupt
the colonial gaze that historically vilifies and demeans our elders as
uneducated,
or simple,
or primitive,
and that deems their
knowledge simply folklore,
popular religion,
or supersitition.
As a space pushing back at these settler mentalities,
Core to the project’s digital development was DSS’ specialization in co-creating open
digital humanities projects that center cultural awareness through web development
and design, online privacy, open source and proprietary web application development
and management, and data stewardship. The library research team included Thornhill as
digital project manager; Gaede as project administrator; Anna Lepska as graduate
student digital research assistant; Azle Malinao-Alvarez as the interactive
technology consultant with support from digital collections and preservation expert
Julia Simic, as well as Corey Gillen and Ray Henry, members of the UO Libraries’
Library Technology Services department (now Applications Development and
Integration). This library team will henceforth be referred to collectively as the
builders
the authors of this paper the authors,
and Reyes-Santos and
Lara the researchers.
This interdisciplinary team placed the healers’
community at the center of the research project to publicly validate and share
aspects of their knowledge with the healers, teachers, researchers, and students
studying race, indigeneity, ethnobotanical medicinal healing, and
intersectionality.
Since 2010, as Afro-Indigenous ceremonialists and scholars working in the fields of Black and Indigenous Studies, Reyes-Santos and Lara have collaborated in Afro-Indigenous survival and revitalization projects, ethnographic research projects, and on another digital project. They have spent the past eleven years travelling to Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and Afro-Indigenous ritual, healing, and ceremonial spaces in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States. While participating in and collaborating with these spaces, they have become students, apprentices, and allies working with elders to continue disseminating and valorizing their traditional knowledge through visits, fundraising, workshops, ceremonies, and academic research. For instance, in 2012, Lara and Reyes-Santos fundraised and planned a visit of Mexica elders to sacred sites in the Dominican Republic, where they met Afro-Indigenous healers and ritual leaders; in 2012, the Black Feminist Retreat in the Dominican Republic brought together U.S.-based Black scholars and artists, and activists, cultural workers, and traditional ceremonialists living in the Dominican Republic; in 2015, they also organized a trip of Mexica and Mezcalero Apache elders to meet Cuban
They began to experiment with digital platforms as powerful tools to share information early on. In 2011 they interviewed Dominican feminist and queer activists on educational justice; Reyes-Santos edited short films documenting their experiences, and posted them to a YouTube channel. In 2017, Lara trained students in Reyes-Santos’ class in ethnographic methodologies to participate in a storytelling documentation trip in the wake of Hurricane Maria and create educational resources for the University of Oregon Puerto Rico Project. Some students travelled to Puerto Rico with Reyes-Santos, took photos documenting the catastrophe and how people organized themselves as communities, and completed interviews with people affected by the Hurricane in mostly rural areas. A student team edited content and created a blog to educate people in the Pacific Northwest about Puerto Rico’s history and to disseminate the stories shared by people in the island.
In 2018, the UO Libraries launched the DSS Faculty Grants Program. As an internal university award, UO faculty were eligible to apply for in-kind and budget support offered by DSS, and its sister library departments, for scholars to explore non-traditional and creative digital scholarship through either through a humanities, social science, or interdisciplinary lens. As a major strategic priority for the department,
How might the sustainability of a digital project be conceptualized from a standpoint that considers humanity as a social construction and subject to change over time and place?
The
Openness is a concept that has come to characterize knowledge and communication systems, epistemologies, society and politics, institutions or organizations, and individual personalities. In essence, openness in all these dimensions refers to a kind of transparency which is the opposite of secrecy and most often this transparency is seen in terms of access to information especially within organizations, institutions or societies.
In order to allow democratic collaboration, co-design, co-creation, co-management, and co-evaluation through the Internet, openness emphasizes free, transparent, and unrestricted access to knowledge and information. Within the digital humanities, openness situates scholars to be self-aware and confront socio-technologic and economic frameworks that influence their research and teaching practices.
As digital cultural heritage materials have become more common online, in large part
thanks to funding through private and grant funding agencies and foundations (e.g.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Institute
of Library and Information Science), openness has become a norm for those working in
custodial
The relationships between openness, data, digital technologies, and Black and
Indigenous studies demonstrate how digital technologies and data privilege white
Western cultural traditions and power systems that systematically oppress human
beings, societies, and cultures through violence, genocide, racism, and
enslavement.
The diasporic and transnational realities of Black communities, and the legacy of slavery and the Middle Passage, present those of us in the Black DH with opportunities to create platforms that represent transcolonial and transnational realities beyond textual representation, while incorporating different communities and learning styles.
Aligned with these Black DH projects, and as scholars who seek to work in the open, we seek to apply decolonizing methodologies connected to the ontologies of openness: access, transparency, collaboration, sharing, accessibility, and the choice of permanence.
For the authors, this means centering participant’s dignity and cultural practices,
and rejecting white, Western settler supremacy ways of being. Ownership and custody
of digital technologies and digital cultural heritage is a core issue for how the
authors operated throughout the project as researchers and builders. The work of Kim
Christen
Reyes-Santos and Lara’s emphasis on Afro-Indigenous narratives honors the historical
reality of
As Afro-Indigenous communities gain visibility, this project initiates what must be a broader dialogue in Black DH about what it means to bridge the concerns of Black and Indigenous methodologies and community needs in the U.S. and internationally for the successful implementation of open scholarship projects. It foregrounds Black Feminist DH practice deeply informed by Indigenous decolonial methodologies for community-based research applied to the digital sphere. The methodological approach to the stories and ethnobotanical resources shared on the site and digital stewardship techniques draw from the norms for social interactions and information sharing exemplified by the healers themselves, as well as healers’ intentions.
The project was always meant to be open, shared beyond the healer and scholarly communities from whence it came. It has been motivated by the needs and desires of the healers themselves. All community participants were excited and saw a need to make traditional knowledge available through new technologies. Rather than see the Internet as a hindrance to their world and belief systems, they articulated an understanding that presenting their work and knowledge to the world was a way to safeguard them and their knowledge. Healers, like the Cuban-American
Reading something on the internet doesn’t mean you know it and understand it.
Many of those who participated, in particular those from Puerto Rico and those living in rural areas in the Dominican Republic, stated there has been a rupture to traditional forms of knowledge transmission and production. They theorize that these ruptures are produced by three primary factors:
Their theories speak to scholarly findings in the field of Black Studies and
Reyes-Santos and Lara’s engagement with the field. Reyes-Santos and Lara understand
that the social violences discussed by healers as the reason behind “early death” are
an extension of colonial-modern state policies that fail to produce the conditions
for sustaining Black life, as well as colonial-modern ideas about race, gender and
sexuality that foster the punishment of gender and sexual difference, and the
devaluation of Blackness. (Wynter 2003) Neoliberal economic policies and state
participation in globalized capitalism have contributed to rapid urban migration and
emigration to Latin America, Europe and North America that have left rural areas
depopulated and/or disenfranchised, and elders caring for land and knowledge on their
own
Ethnographic and historical research by Lara documents that Christian colonial
violence leads to the ongoing ostracization of traditional healers, the demonization
of Afro-Indigenous practices and traditions, the dismantling of altars and the
destruction of sacred sites
As stated by Winona LaDuke, Traditional ecological knowledge is
the culturally and spiritually based way in which Indigenous peoples relate to
their ecosystems.
Here we highlight how Afro-descendant and
Afro-Indigenous communities have a wealth of resources to contribute to TEK in the
Americas. Our Black Feminist DH approach required that the authors be willing to be
transformed by the people Reyes-Santos and Lara were honoring in the documentation
process; Reyes-Santos and Lara had to be open to transform how they imagined the
work, how at times they were trained to undertake this kind of endeavor. The
researchers centered Black/Afro-descendant women and queer healers’ voices and ways
of knowing, while destabilizing colonial distinctions between researchers and
research subjects
Healers, researchers, and builders were engaged in a collaborative process of knowledge production to together imagine what would be the best ways of representing the information on the website. We privileged oral transmission of knowledge over archives while still providing access to relevant archival projects, scholarship, creative work, and educational tools. We recognized the orality that characterizes interactions with healers and the relevance of sustaining oral traditions in the contemporary moment; specifically, honoring how women and queer people have maintained traditional ecological and medicinal knowledge alive while facing high levels of social vulnerability and violence whether in the Caribbean or the U.S.
As articulated by Moya Bailey, The ways in which identities
inform both theory and practice in digital humanities have been largely
overlooked. Those already marginalized in society and the academy can also find
themselves in the liminal spaces of this field. By centering the lives of women,
people of color, and disabled folks, the types of possible conversations
in digital humanities shift. The move “from margin to
center” offers the opportunity to engage new sets of theoretical
questions that expose implicit assumptions about what and who counts in digital
humanities as well as exposes structural limitations that are the inevitable
result of an unexamined identity politics of whiteness, masculinity, and
ablebodiness
This research project provides a powerful counterpoint to the context in which
Afro-Indigenous traditions are being maintained and practiced. The aforementioned
dynamics not only generate interruptions in inter-generational transmission of
traditional ecological and spiritual knowledges. They are also reflective of a
socio-political context in which Afro-Indigenous traditions and ways of knowing
are marginalized. As the empty out,
traditional land bases and community spaces are increasingly
threatened. As economic marginalization increases, Black people, Afro-Indigenous
healers have to become even more creative in figuring out ways to gather the
medicines that they need, collect the materials for their offerings, and develop
paths to find each other.
Very much aligned with Reyes-Santos and Lara’s approaches to working with the healers, the authors’ awareness of socio-political sensitivities heavily influenced the digital treatments of spoken word, portraits, plant location data, Internet access, and website design worked to not reinforce the harms brought upon Afro-Indigenous communities. Together, healer, researcher, and builder methodologies sought to subvert the western-centric approach to using digital tools for tools and innovations and putting something on the Internet for the sake of making information publicly available. It was important for the authors to always ask questions of the community regarding access, transparency, collaboration, sharing, accessibility, and the choice of permanence. Ultimately, the authors’ approach first foregrounded permission and consent knowing that not all information should be free and open. Centering the healer community's individual choice and cultural access protocols was their first priority.
Beginning in 2016, Reyes-Santos and Lara conducted interviews with women healers
in rural and urban communities in the Dominican Republic, the Pacific Northwest,
Cuba and Puerto Rico. In these interviews, they focused on the world views of
their elders. Their research approaches were (and continue to be) grounded in a
critical Indigenous approach
Critically engaged methods include the collection of oral histories,
These initial methods soon transformed into a practice of deep listening. The
first thing Reyes-Santos and Lara were taught was deep listening. Over the last
decade, they have learned to understand deep listening as a practice that is
central to the pedagogical methods of Caribbean religious traditions. It involves
listening with the whole body, to what is articulated and unarticulated, and
paying attention to what is seen and not seen. Deep listening is about observing
collective ritual behaviors and the utterances that take place between people. To
listen deeply is to be a part of, extending beyond ethnographic participant
observation and into the realm of being in loving community. To listen deeply is
to listen to dreams, to listen to the counsel of spirits and
ancestors,
to dance to music, and to be present to the ups and downs of
their elders’ (and their families’) lives.
Deep listening changed Reyes-Santos and Lara as researchers because it changed
their orientations to being,
to space-time, and to their own relations. It
required prioritizing recording the conversation in the format most comfortable to
the healers; to undertake interviews healers with husbands, children, neighbors,
or patients around us or while on a hike through a forest in the middle of a hot
tropical morning. Deep listening is about being embedded in everyday living, to
listen to the cacophony of voices, noises, landscapes where healing takes place.
Beyond the initial interview, Reyes-Santos and Lara were kept accountable to this
practice by continued check-ins and visits with healers. Their relationships
transcend the timeline of the project.
By engaging in a practice of deep listening, Reyes-Santos and Lara first learned
that all of the elders have unique and powerful understandings of the divine,
known variously as Bondieu, Papa Dios, Olofi, Ometeotl and Gran Espíritu. They
learned about the unspoken understandings of elders’ relationships to ancestors
and to all living beings, which are the primary sites for healing. They learned
about the parameters of what is considered alive
and dead
(e.g. all of
existence is alive, but plastic is dead). They learned about the context in which
life is prolonged and death is accepted — or not. They learned about how current
economic, political and social conditions are understood in relationship to the
prolongation and/or decimation of the lives of elders, their families, their
communities, and the land itself. They learned that in different traditions
healing is directed either towards the prolongation of life or toward the aversion
of death. These distinct orientations translate into relationships with the plant
world, relationships with the spirit and ancestral worlds, and relationships to
living, breathing human beings.
In addition to deeply listening, Reyes-Santos and Lara also walked. Miriam Ricourt
describes walking as a practice of disruption and meaning-making that was and
continues to be a central praxis of maroon peoples (
There were stories of disappeared species, of disappeared peoples, of new constructions and new economic forces. There were stories of successful healings and of challenging circumstances. There were stories of plants transplanted and of the spirits who lived among them. All of this was possible to learn when they walked together.
Deep listening and walking required Reyes-Santos and Lara to shift their emphasis from video clips in the original prospectus to audio clips that are not clear of contextual noise. The microphone often created an uncomfortable situation in spaces where knowledge is mostly produced through communal conversation, questions, and interactions with the human world and plants. Most of the women interviewed did not feel comfortable being recorded on video and shared their most insightful stories while receiving patients or taking a stroll to show specific plants.
To produce a website with equal representation, Reyes-Santos and Lara decided to privilege audio over video to share information. Audio clips are short and speak to specific, relevant themes. They worked with an editor who was asked to leave contextual noise in the recordings to enable the listener to understand what it was like to be in conversation with the healer in their everyday practice and subtly convey the context. Reyes-Santos and Lara are not documentary filmmakers and were aware they were not seeking to produce documentary-quality material. They were documenting some of the wealth of knowledge they have received over the years from elders and share that knowledge respectfully with others seeking to value it, research it, and connect with it. The material on the website allows us all to reflect on how we have come to construe knowledge in the Americas and what our elders have to offer as humanity approaches a variety of social and environmental challenges.
Working with elders in a transparent way that honors the sacrifices they continue to make to sustain their knowledge means that everything presented on the website has been discussed with them. Reyes-Santos and Lara printed photographs, shared audio clips and received the authorization to continue not just from the elders, but also from the guardian spirits that guide them. This multi-layered process of knowledge ratification extends beyond the ethical boundaries of university human subjects committees and is directly and permanently rooted in the ethical parameters of Afro-Indigenous traditions themselves.
Researching within and with traditional ceremonial and healing communities carries
with it the ethical obligation to not only cause no harm, but the additional
ethical obligation of honoring the self-determination and affective and spiritual
priorities of Afro-Indigenous communities. Reyes-Santos and Lara presented these
values in a slide show format in the website. Together, these values articulate a
different set of ethical values underlying community engaged digital humanities
scholarship. These values place Black voices, ways of knowing, ways of being and
ways of teaching front and center within the digital sphere, rupturing implicit assumptions about what and who counts in digital
humanities
Antes que todo, Dios. (Gracias a la Misericordia): Humility before Creation, and all beings – human, plant and animal – are a manifestation of Creation
Todo Vive.: All of Earth is alive; All of Earth is life.
Moyumba/Ancestros: To honor ancestors and elders and all those who have come before us.
Obedi ka ka, obedi le le.: Knowldege was shared throughout the world.
Convivir.: To be in relation with each other across a long span of time.
Compartir.: To generate intimacy and authenticity in our relations through storytelling, laughter, sitting together, eating together, etc.
Cara a Cara.: To see each other’s faces, to know the truth of our experiences in each other’s gazes/eyes/faces
Ser generosa.: To never arrive empty handed, to never let someone leave empty handed, either.
Ser recíproca.: Enabling balance in the universe between all living beings, material and immaterial, even in the creation of knowledge.
Hay que fluir.: To be flexible and easy-going in the rhythms of life’s chaos and unexpected events.
From the beginning Reyes-Santos and Lara knew that they wanted
The questions asked by the builders (Appendix A) helped to inform approaches to
the overall digital stewardship and web development approach to the project. By
applying these questions that were inspired by National Endowment for the
Humanities recommendations for data management plan
The technologies used to build
At the University of Oregon, WordPress and the premium theme Divi are available as
a Software as a Service enterprise technology solution through the vendor
CampusPress. The project’s digital assets and written content representation,
usability, and arrangement, flexibility for responsive web design and visual
design, and the ability to have interactive media embedded in the site were
foundational technical requirements. The batch upload and extraction of embedded
descriptive metadata from digital images were important for digital project
workflows and possible in WordPress. The platform also needed to allow for embed
streaming audio-visual assets hosted on a third-party streaming media service, and
store at least 1 GB of data. The UO’s campus agreement with CampusPress meant the
digital technologies were vetted by the university for ADA-compliance (WCAG 2.0
Level AA) and other campus privacy and security records requirements. WordPress is
commonly used by the DH community
Interviews for
The map requirements for this project included the ability to embed it within the project site and have the ability to operate like a tour and simulation of moving from one country, as seen in Figure 3, Cuba, to another – a rupture to the borders produced through our modern nation-states. The tool also allowed builders to make web accessibility modifications for universal user experience using the HTML tags. At the time of the build, StoryMapsJS hosted by the Northwestern University Knight Lab met this requirement.
The digital assets created for this research project included audio files, digital
images, and textual documents. All digital files and metadata associated with them
required specific tools for creation, manipulation, file interoperability, and
ability to meet digital preservation standards supported by the United States
National Archives and Records Administration.
Digital stewardship, also called data stewardship, is framed within a research
data management and archival context it is the creation and management of digital
objects over a lifecycle involving the creation, appraisal and selection, ingest,
preservation actions, digital storage, access and reuse, and transformation
(Digital Curation Centre 2021). Rooted in library and archival information science
practice, digital stewardship calls for digital practitioners to curate and
preserve digital files, and the metadata or information that gives said files
context and meaning, with the goal of long-term access and on-going preservation
planning that avoids technological obsolescence. Traditionally applied only to
digital asset management or research data management spaces, digital stewardship
can extend to the software access and preservation with the goal of supporting
organizational decision practices associated with the development, maintenance,
and preservation of technological infrastructures
The central frame for the research team’s work is to center the dignity and respect the cultural practices of the people with whom they are working. Toward that goal, the team worked to maintain transparency with each other and asked what can be difficult questions regarding access, collaboration, sharing, accessibility, and the choice of permanence.
Speaking first to transparency, it was important to acknowledge the white hegemony of academia, libraries, and the digital space, and the potential for intellectual violence when white researchers enter the Black research space. Within the team, we sought to forestall this by centering the healers, the researchers, their voices, methodologies, and the values shared. We also maintained a regular meeting schedule to continue to discuss all aspects of site design and implementation as wireframes and interactive prototypes were created. Throughout this collaborative process, issues regarding the site’s overall layout, navigation, and missed pages and content were remediated together.
Access connects to intellectual property ownership and custody, readability and interpretations within cultural contexts, and public access to the project. Designing
These examples associated with access are also ones of collaboration, another tenant of openness. The project team worked by respecting each other's expertise and centering collaboration with the community, asking many questions and prioritizing culturally aware and accessible design that could only be planned, built, and maintained with the support and expertise of the full interdisciplinary team. In supporting the web design for cultural awareness, Reyes-Santos and Lara discussed with the building team what colors, symbols, and visual characteristics were appropriate and which could not be used, such as the color red. Using these guidelines, Malinao-Alvarez and Thornhill worked together to create an accessibility-compliant color palette and style guide, as seen in Figure 4, to shape the feel of the site.
Ensuring Spanish access to the website was critical because the majority of healers are monolingual Spanish speakers, and similarly, a major audience for the website was the English-speaking student body of the University of Oregon for whom we would need to transcribe and translate the healers’ Spanish language knowledge and interviews.
For both groups, it is important for them to hear the words used by the communities themselves to name the plants they use for healing; to have their plant knowledge validated throughout the site and for others to learn such names. This was a major reason why the research team declined to use the Latin scientific or English terms for the plants. The sixteen interview clips on the website were selected and edited from full-length interviews, first by undergraduate research assistant Miguel Perez and then by Thornhill after Perez needed to leave the project. When artificial intelligence captioning services from Panopto and Zoom proved unable to provide Spanish transcriptions for the edited clips, first Perez, then Thornhill created transcriptions, which we contracted with Rev.com for English translations. After having graduate assistant Lepska, Reyes-Santos, and Lara review these translations for quality assurance, future transcriptions and translations were performed by Transcription Outsourcing LLC. Reyes-Santos and Lara continued to review translations for accuracy before anything was made available on the site.
The careful curation of shared knowledge was a major task for the research team, selecting what was appropriate to be shared openly and online and what was for the healer community alone. The choice of open or closed access remains with the community; these collections did not become part of the Libraries’ collections, nor are the healer interviews available to be downloaded through Panopto. One area that this was particularly acute was in the creation of the digital map and the latitude and longitude associated with the photographs of plants taken in association with a planned ethnobotanical dictionary. That metadata was removed using EXIF Tool and Adobe Bridge and for the map, abstracted to a more general location, with the story shared on the map talking about history and methodology, rather than the specificity of the location or the research site where the photograph was taken. This honored some of the healers’ requests to protect them from ongoing ostracization in their communities.
What is shared, though, is meant to be shared with the largest possible audience. A running thread throughout the process was the emphasis on accessibility, navigation, content display and ability to view the content through multiple kinds of devices and networks. Given that the majority of healers in the project live in rural communities outside the U.S., and that they access the internet through phones on 3G networks, we wanted to ensure that the website is equitable, flexible, and intuitive for user and interactivity; have information be perceived in multiple ways regardless of sensory ability; and have the site be responsive to different screen sizes dependent on the types of technical devices used to access it. By applying accessibility concepts throughout the digital technology selection and digital content process, the builders understood requirements for a sitemap, inspirations for look and feel, and different ways to represent and engage with interviews. For example, transcriptions and translations were made separately available to download on healer pages. These PDFs, which are speech-to-text reader-friendly, are read aloud by the computer.
Given the principles of openness informing
We can and should approach digital projects with a clear understanding of their limited lifespan, engaging in appropriate digital stewardship activities to ensure the underlying digital collections are maintained. Beyond those collections, however, the builders sought a greater level of sustainability for
In selecting a digital mapping tool, we opted for the familiar open-source option, Northwestern University’s Knight Lab-sponsored StoryMapJS, rather than ESRI’s recently updated Story Map product. Either would have worked for our needs, abstracting from a specific location to protect healers’ privacy and showcasing Reyes-Santos' and Lara’s images and writings from their research sites. Each story on the map focuses on the spiritual histories of enslaved and colonized Indigenous communities of that location. Given the builders’ collective experience with StoryMapJS, we were disinclined to add a new platform to our oeuvre for the sake of it or because it was new. In the time since
Ultimately, the lifespan of
black feminism offers interventions that serve to dismantle embedded privilege and reification and (digitally) center the experiences of Black women within digital humanities research.
Team communication can be challenging across disciplines. The disciplinary vocabulary and jargon, particularly that associated with the digital work, could create barriers between researchers and builders. Similarly, researchers had to find language to explain project stages to healers. Ongoing communication and mutual openness to questions was key and created opportunities to learn and share new words, meanings, and theories that are part of expertise in ethnography, black feminist praxis, decolonial methodologies, ethnobotany, web development, and information science. An example of this communication challenge are definitions and applications of metadata that are required for images, interviews, and other materials cataloging.
The Pacific Northwest Just Futures Institute for Racial and Climate Justice was founded in early 2021 with a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is sponsoring the next stage of
Reyes-Santos and Lara will work with Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous, and Black communities in the Pacific Northwest to document and disseminate how these healers deploy TEK to support communities disproportionately impacted by climate change, its attendant environmental disasters, and the pandemic; foster and document TEK exchanges between growing migrant Afro-Indigenous communities and local Native and African American communities; train students to engage in related climate and racial-justice research; and recruit students of color and working-class students as research interns. Work will include edited audio/video interviews, ethnobotanical surveys, and pedagogical resources, in collaboration with students of color, migrant students, and first-generation students.
Reyes and Lara, both Black-Indigenous women, placed the desires, visions and values of their communities at the center of their collaboration with the UO Libraries. With or without technology, Afro-Indigenous healers in the Caribbean continue to live their lives, working for a present and future in which Black life can be sustained across the generations. And, as the healers told us, this project enables the transmission of knowledge in ways that circumvent the impacts of social violence, rapid emigration and ongoing social stigma.
We do expect that while facing these challenges and lessons,
The songline is alive in Mukurtu: Return, reuse, and respect