When you know your work will involve re-traumatising already traumatised people, how do you create and hold a space of support and respect, without becoming so personally impacted that you stop being effective?

This last week of my foundations for information management course focuses on what it means to bring your whole self to work. It looks at work done by librarians, records managers and archivists where dealing well with emotions and personal histories (our own and others’) make a big difference to how well we do our job.

This morning my class was very lucky to have the generous Genevieve Weber deliver a Zoom session about gratitude in the archives, based on her 2019 discussion of the attitudes and practices she has adapted as Assistant Head of Archives at the Royal British Columbia Museum, working with Indigenous records. Rituals of thanksgiving.

Well, that is what we had planned for her to talk about.

Instead of working on the presentation to my class in the last couple of weeks, as she had planned, she had been working with other archivists across Canada. They were putting together an archival jigsaw, providing as much information as possible to descendants and survivors of the Kamloops Residential School in BC, where unmarked graves of over 200 children were confirmed about a fortnight ago. Genevieve had described working with these records as part of the 2019 pre-reading I had students do for her session.

I do not think my class missed out in any way. Genevieve brought her whole self. Embodying adaptability while acknowledging setback, she gave a presentation that she had given a couple of weeks previously at the Society of California Archivists AGM 2021. She was straightforward and respectful about the work she was doing, neither hiding the difficulty, nor describing it in heightened detail. She mentioned joyfulness, something certainly not taught in the classroom when I went through library school.

A picture of the research room with an engrossed family reading records of their ancestors. “See, see how many are at the table. Usually there is just one person allowed per table. And they have their backs to the staff member sitting at the desk, also not usually allowed. And that hat. There was a history of material being stolen across the country by people, taking it out in their hats and coats, so usually no hats… and that guy, that one there… he discovered a tape of his dad’s voice, headset on he shouted across the room “I can hear him, I can hear him””.

If you want to think more about Genevieve’s ideas of gratitude, I would recommend the article below.

Weber, G. (2019). Gratitude in the archives. Garland Magazine. https://garlandmag.com/article/gratitude-in-the-archives/

For an indigenous voice about the complexity and emotion of discovering generational trauma in historical records, I would recommend:

Shiosaki, E. (2020). Friday essay: ‘I am anxious to have my children home’: recovering letters of love written for Noongar children. The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-i-am-anxious-to-have-my-children-home-recovering-letters-of-love-written-for-noongar-children-127809