The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture is creating a new free online resource, making archives more accessible to students, families, researchers and communities.
The Indigenous Digital Archive (IDA) makes archives easier to use than ever before. It allows researchers to work more naturally and more socially with archives. If researchers want to share their work online, they can connect information, enhance individual, family, and community histories. It also allows users to correct the record and write counter-narratives to what is found in government records. For those who prefer their work to remain private, there is still the ability to easily keep track of and/or cite individual pages, or to share documents and images on social media.
The Indigenous Digital Archive is a collaborative project with the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. It’s funded by a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the New Mexico Historical Records Advisory Board and the Knight Foundation.
On Sept. 20, the Indigenous Nations Library Program (INLP), is hosting a lecture facilitated partially by the IDA. “The Indigenous Digital Archive: Records of the Early Government Boarding Schools and Native Rights to Land and Water” will be from noon-1:30 p.m. in the Waters Room of Zimmerman Library, with Daniel Moya and Anna Naruta-Moya presenting.
Daniel Moya (Tewa, P’o Suwae Ge Owingeh) conducts social media outreach and community engagement for the IDA. Moya was raised on the reservation by his grandfather and grandmother, who attended the Santa Fe Indian Industrial boarding school from the age of five (her father was one of the few graduates from Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in 1901). Moya works as a contractor for the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs International Visitor Leadership Program. A UNM grad, he is an award-winning artist in sculpture and bronze, received a New Mexico History Scholar award for research on the Indian Boarding Schools of Santa Fe, and gives talks on the boarding schools as incubators of Native American sports. He and his wife, Anna Naruta-Moya, are 2017-18 Digital Knowledge Sharing Fellows of the American Philosophical Society’s Mellon Foundation Native American Studies Initiative.
Anna Naruta-Moya, PhD, is project director for the Indigenous Digital Archive. Naruta-Moya is a Certified Archivist and SAA Digital Archives Specialist, has served as an archivist for the Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University and the U.S. National Archives, and consults for organizations including the Santa Fe Opera. Concern for the ability to share and communicate about objects from different repositories and create projects with longevity led her to join the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) community to help create shared opensource applications for archival collections. A past fellow of the Getty summer institute in digital art history, she is a research associate professor of the University of New Mexico and a research associate of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.