VOICES

Unearthing Our Roots, Telling Our Stories

I first became interested in the archival and memory fields when I started exploring more about my Caribbean heritage and the region’s history of indenture. Like many people with a history of being colonized, those of us with indentured ancestry are not able to turn to colonial archival material to properly learn about the history of our people.

Colonial archives like those of the British Empire’s are full of records that tell a story of labor exploitation and cruelty instead of anything about the lives and cultures of my ancestors. However, even within my community, the voices and perspectives of straight, cisgender men have historically been the most prominent. Women and queer people, identities I belong to, did not have much of a voice. This led my friends and I to found Ro(u)ted by Our Stories, an Indo-Caribbean oral history project centering the stories of women and other marginalized genders. Through this project I began to engage more with the archival field and after a few years decided to apply to graduate school so I could further learn about archival systems and theory.

What I’ve learned in my master’s program has confirmed that most institutional governmental archives are inherently colonial, from the way they are set up to the way governments use them to legitimize their nation-building. Western-centric archival theory is also still struggling to extract itself from colonial and white supremacist views of what is considered a legitimate “record”—namely textual documents.

As I start my doctoral journey, my research will focus on exploring other forms of records in the Caribbean that have not traditionally been recognized by dominant Western archival theory: land, jewelry, songs and food, to name a few. I aim to surface histories of the colonized and provide better context and information for living descendants of indenture hoping to learn more about our roots and better understand our identities.

Dharani Persaud '13 is an incoming doctorate student at the University of British Columbia, living on the stolen ancestral lands of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱w.7mesh (Squamish), and səlilw̓ ətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. You can usually find them writing or seeking out any available vitamin D.