As an online event, attendees and presenters will be coming from many different places around the world. However, we wish to expressly acknowledge that the UBC iSchool is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam people.

In lieu of charging a student fare for this event, we encourage attendees to support Indigenous Climate Action.

Records and Archives in Times of Crisis

Following a year ravaged by various public health and safety crises across the globe, memory workers in numerous roles have seen their responsibilities evolve along with our social and political landscapes. In addition to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we have faced a continuous increase in overt racism and state-sanctioned violence against Black, Indigenous, and First Nations peoples as well as communities of color. We have also felt the devastating effects of climate change on underserved communities as well as natural disasters that put our physical iterations of collective memory at risk. Just as these crises affect individuals and communities, they also impact and shape records, archives, and memory institutions--and vice versa. As archivists, records managers, and memory workers, we must ask ourselves what our role is in our current social and political climate as racial injustice and climate change continue to wreak havoc on our most vulnerable populations. How do we address injustice and instability in our records and archives? How do we mitigate them? How can we make the biggest impact for those who continue to suffer from their effects? For our upcoming 2021 Discussion Series, we hope to begin a dialogue that addresses these questions as well as the complex issues and concerns that necessarily come along with them. We have chosen to focus on racial injustice and climate change within the same series because their causes and effects are often inextricable. 

In this first panel, we’ll be focusing on responding to climate change as archivists, records managers, and memory workers. We’ve invited professionals from various backgrounds who have experience tackling environmental and sustainability issues to engage in discussion and attempt to answer questions posed by students at UBC’s School of Information. Consideration will be given to how concerns such as physical impacts of climate change, ecological footprints, public awareness of the ongoing dilemma, and documentation/preservation of this crisis could inform archival practice going forward. 

For information about our two other panels in the series, please visit the registration pages for Documenting Injustice as it Unfolds (April 30) and Allyship in the Archives (May 28).

About the panelists:

Eira Tansey is the digital archivist/records manager at the University of Cincinnati. Her research interests include climate change effects on archives, regulatory impacts on recordkeeping, and labor issues among archivists. Her work has been featured in VICE, Nature, and Pacific Standard. She was the recipient of the 2019 Society of American Archivists Council Resolution honoring her work examining the impacts of climate change on archival repositories.

Hilda Teresa Ayala González has a master in Archival Studies from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver Canada and a master’s in Library Science from the University of Puerto Rico. Previously she worked as the Research Services Librarian at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez providing workshops and developing research guides about digital scholarship and data management. She also helped establish and developed the digital institutional repository and the preservation workshop at the library after the impact of Hurricane Maria in 2017. In 2019 she joined the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña and was responsible of establishing the preservation and digitization program. She is part of the Board of Directors of the Red de Archivos de Puerto Rico (Network of Archives of Puerto Rico) and the Alliance for Cultural Emergencies. In July 2020 she was designated the Director of the General Archives and the National Library of Puerto Rico.  

Lois Evans is a sessional lecturer and PhD Candidate at the University of British Columbia, and a UBC Sustainability Scholar and UBC Public Scholar. Her research focuses on records management work in the context of climate change, adaptation, and mitigation. Lois is a records manager and archivist with over 15 years’ experience and the working group chair of the Canadian General Standards Board’s Electronic Records as Documentary Evidence.

Bruce Muir has a master’s degree in environmental studies and natural resources and works as the Senior Environmental Planner in the Lands and Resources Department of West Moberly First Nations in northeast British Columbia. His traditional name is Wadziih, which means “Caribou” in Dunne-za. He is a co-author of the first action plan to protect endangered caribou in Canada based on the federal Species at Risk Act. As a community-based researcher, his research and publications focus on the traditional ecological knowledge and land uses of Indigenous cultures, strategic and environment assessment, planning, spatial analysis, and place-based mapping. He has been an expert witness at hearings of the National Energy Board of Canada and the British Columbia Utilities Commission relating to environmental impact assessment and Indigenous peoples.   

Rebecca Sinclair (Merasty) is a nêhiyaw-iskwêw, wife, and mother of three. She is from Barren Lands First Nation and a member of Little Saskatchewan First Nation. She moved from Treaty 5 in northern Manitoba to Winnipeg, Treaty one territory to obtain a Bachelor’s degree (Environmental and Native Studies) from the University of Manitoba. Rebecca is the Program Coordinator for Lake Winnipeg Indigenous Collective and works as an Independent Indigenous Researcher. Rebecca pursues higher learning that comes from the land and through learning alongside knowledge keepers. Her childhood spent on the land in northern Manitoba has shaped her understanding and guided her efforts to protect and preserve the great gifts of our sacred Earth.

Additional notes:

The ACA student chapter at UBC would like to thank the Association of Canadian Archivists for their support of this panel series.

This webinar will be recorded for later publication by ACA@UBC