ABSTRACT

There are as many stories about archives as there are stories kept inside them. What long string of coincidences and near-misses meant certain bits of paper, photos and other items found their way here? Who visits, and for what? What hours is the archive open, and why? Who has quietly slipped what into pockets? What do the cleaners and security people think of the place they look after? We collectively constitute archives. We create them and tend them through our engagements with specific sources alongside each other. Some archives claim to be exhaustive or at least representative. Archives New Zealand, for example, describes itself as “Keeper of the Public Record – the Memory of Government” as if there are no other memories (and no other governments) than those you find housed in its lovely glass and steel structure. Some archives are not housed in a place with the word “archive” painted on the front door. An archive in my line of work is just as likely to be in a wardrobe, cupboard or meetinghouse; Indigenous texts might be carved, oral, written, sung, woven, danced and so on. Archives are places where things, people and ideas come together. In this chapter I engage two texts from the Pacific – an essay by Epeli Hauʽofa and poem by Evelyn PatuawaNathan – that argue for assuming Indigenous presence and proximity rather than focusing on distance and loss. I then turn to my own research in order to elaborate how this approach can lead not only to different archives but to different understandings of what one might find there.