[Music] so how would you feel if your entire cultural identity was erased right if I or someone other than yourself decided that you just weren't important enough to be written down or if your history was written down then that record would then wasn't kept or if that record was written down and that record was kept someone to subsequently decided to go back and describe your history not in the way that you would but rather in their perspective of you so in any of these cases the question that I'm asking is if your history is it
recorded and preserved well did you exist well yes of course I existed of course I've mattered my identity my personhood on this planet means something unfortunately that is not in fact the case you see history is not just everything now backwards right that is something that we call the past and history is also not just a catalog of events put into the right order history is in fact a series of strategically curated decisions right decisions that have the ability to either uplift some or silence others and those choices those decisions are made by people like
myself people like archivists librarians scholars researchers but regardless they are still decisions and herein lies the the the impact the power of bias and privilege with the ability to create entire silenced landscapes of people groups entirely based on the decision of either being included or excluded from history making so what ends up happening is that we implicitly trust the evidence that we find in an archive right we see letters or photographs in these archives as the closest thing to actually being there but we tend to overlook the bias decision-making practices of the archivist or of
the history gatekeeper about what you found in that archive and what you didn't so we look at these letters and photographs and we think about well whose letters did I find but whose letters will I never find and what was the position or the person or the perspective of the individual letters that I found and whose perspective and positions will I never find I feel like it's it's it's quite unfathomable to to understand the 99.99999% first-person experience that will never be remembered that has been purposefully oppressed suppressed or buried from history in so in its
simplest terms the the inclusion or exclusion of documents or or of things from history making is an assertion of power right and and that and such has been the case of African American history in this country and so if you were interested in in better understanding or having evidence of African American culture in this country you might look at the Charles teenie Harris archive so Charles teenie Harris was a photographer for the Pittsburgh courier one of the most influential black newspapers of the 20th century and and and he worked in photographing the everyday lives of
African Americans here in this community as well as the everyday celebrities such as as the the Duke Ellington's the Muhammad Ali's the Martin Luther King's of the world he photographed all of these individuals as they were coming in and out of Pittsburgh but he's probably most famous for photographing the hill district during the height of the Jazz era and so at this time you're gonna have a lot of artists such as Billy Eckstine and Billy Strayhorn Duke Ellington Lena Horne Nina Simone Mary Lou Williams Eric garner the list truly goes on and on and on
of artists coming in and out of Pittsburgh being photographed by teenie Harris but now looking back we might ask well what happened to the Hill District well one way to create these silence landscapes that I mentioned earlier is to use the the tool I guess of urban renewal to physically create silenced landscapes so in the case of the hill district here in Pittsburgh the entire lower half of that neighborhood was destroyed in order to build the Civic Arena which was then destroyed but now looking back the only evidence that we have of this of this
cultural icon of this thriving community is in individuals memories and thankfully captured visually in the teenie Harris photographs so as an archivist we you as the teenie Harris archivist ik we are trying to break down some of those traditionally held archival practices by actually trying to uplift a people's voice in a people's history now we do this by actually asking the community how they would like to be remembered and then recording those stories according to their own standards and vocabularies because we believe above all else that the collective power of memory has the ability to
propel life forward into contemporary relevance we understand that the beliefs and the ideas held in common by many individuals have the ability to create solidarity and community so as an archivist one of the things that I am trying to do in order to break down these these traditionally held practices by better understanding archival theory such as election appraisal appraisal and description is to create these new forms of archival theory that include racially conscious and culturally competent practices so racially conscious culturally competent archival theory seeks to apply as many if not all of these attributes as
possible when recording the history of a people group because we understand that if we continue to ignore how bias and privilege create large gaps in history making we will continue to have histories that look the same way that they do now so archivists as an archivist I am striving every day towards the upliftment of a people and of a voice because I truly believe that when marginalized and under documented individuals and groups are actually able to champion for themselves their property and their culture maybe maybe then we can feel more assured that we are actually
building a history that is reflective and inclusive of all of us by heating the voices of those who have been traditionally silenced by historiography thank you you [Music]
