Indigenous Knowledges: Interview with Research Assistant Sarah French
This article was co-written by Sophie Schneider and Sarah French.
We interviewed Sarah French, our research assistant for the Indigenous Knowledges project. Sarah is based at the University of Kent, although during her time on this project she will undertake a placement here at Wellcome Collection and a three-week residency in Arizona.
What is your academic background?
“I have always been interested in alternative and hidden narratives in art history. I studied photography as an undergraduate, followed by a Master’s in Art History at the University of Sussex.
It was during my Master’s that I started looking at travelling and collecting when I wrote a small term paper on a 19th century traveller, collector and photographer, Annie Brassey. This blew up into Post Doctorate study in partnership with the University of Sussex and Hastings Museum and Art Gallery. During my PhD, I’ve been researching the ethnographic collection at the museum and making connections with dispersed photographic collections, particularly those at the Huntington Library, California, Hastings Library and The Keep Archives in Falmer, East Sussex.
I came to this doctoral project from a feminist perspective and examined the hidden histories of women’s contributions to art, photography, collecting, and travel writing. I was also interested in discussions around colonialism and empire and quickly realized that there’s so many other voices in the story that are not being told.
How did you become interested in Indigenous Studies?
“It was through recognising that Brassey’s collections need to be recontextualised for today’s audiences and reassociated with their source communities that I became interested in Indigenous Studies. It was something I sort of fell into, as I didn’t come to it from a particular taught course or anything like that.
Part of Brassey’s collection includes a ceremonial feather cloak from the Kingdom of Hawai’i, an ‘Ahu ‘ula. I learnt that the King of Hawai’i, King David Kalākaua, had travelled to Hastings in 1881 as part of his own world tour. This really intrigued me because the idea of travel taking place both ways — particularly within the context of Hastings’ museum collection — is so often overlooked.
I was in contact with the Hawaiian State Archives and the Iolani Palace in Honolulu and found out that they had collections relating to Brassey there as well. Through this connection I was able to meet with students from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa travelling to the UK in the summer of 2019 as part of a Hawaiian Youth Abroad Program run by the Native Hawaiian Student Services. I hosted their visit to Hastings, and we walked in the footsteps of King Kalākaua. The group were visiting at the height of the protest action against the construction of another giant telescope on their sacred ground, the volcano Mauna Kea. It was a time when it was really difficult for them to be away from home. So, I learned a lot more about the kind of struggles that they’re facing now and how many still see the USA’s annexation as an illegal occupation.
What attracted you to the Indigenous Knowledges project?
“I want to put theory into practice. Although I like to work practically, a PhD does consist mostly of theoretical approaches, especially through the pandemic!
The Indigenous Knowledges project feels like something very tangible, something that can make an actual positive difference by using digital humanities. I hope we can make a proper case for open, accessible, and reciprocal collections systems.
As my background is in building partnerships, this is also something that really drew me in. I’m looking forward to travelling to Arizona for my residency and making those connections, particularly with Rhiannon Sorrell and others at Diné College. My trip will coincide with the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums (ATALM) 2022 conference in October. ATALM is the global gathering of Indigenous archivists and museum people, providing us with opportunities to outreach and network with peer institutions worldwide as well as our other partner organisations.
I will also be arriving in the Navajo Nation just before Indigenous People’s Day in the USA on Monday 10 October, so this will be a really interesting and exciting time to arrive. The landscape and the culture are going to be very different to what I’m used to and so I’m looking forward to learning a lot. I’ve been told to be cautious of the altitude; Chinle is about 1,600m above sea level which I’m definitely not used to!
What are your reflections on your work so far with Indigenous Knowledges (IK)?
“I’ve been doing a lot of reading these first two months to get initiated into the project, especially around data sovereignty and learning about relevant networks and organisations. I’ve found the project to be really interdisciplinary, so I’ve been stepping beyond my existing experiences which have been very visual, material and museum-based. With IK, we’re looking at printed literary materials (versus museum objects). There’s been a lot of librarianship terminology used and great discussions on linguistics that have really expanded my way of thinking — it was great hearing about Rebecca Slatcher’s PhD work at the British Library (on North American Indigenous languages in their print collections). Then, during the Digital Sprint (which you can read about here) it felt like I was stretching my computer science knowledge! The Local Contexts work also comes from a law perspective, so all in all there’s been a lot to take in.
It was great to be able to launch our reading group in June. We studied three texts introducing our project partners and colleagues to Indigenous studies. We started with the introductory chapter of Decolonizing methodologies (2012) where author Linda Tuhiwai Smith rethinks the relationship between scholarly research and the legacies of colonialism and we also discussed Decolonization is not a metaphor (2012) by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. As a few of the IK project have a background in film, we watched the documentary Reel Injun (2009) which is an incisive documentary on the history of First Peoples’ representation on screen. This was such a great starting point and really made me think about how these on-screen representations have been tied up in my earliest memories of cinema.”
You can reach out to either Sarah or Sophie to learn more about the project on researchdevelopmentteam@wellcomecollection.org.
