Roundtable: Indigenous Archiving

Staff at PMA member organisations are invited to register for our forthcoming roundtable. Details on the event, what will be covered, and who it’s for, are all below.

Public broadcasters and media institutions have an important responsibility to protect and promote Indigenous languages, cultural integrity, and data sovereignty, ensuring that communities have authority over how their knowledge and stories are collected, stored, and shared.

However, archives have been built without the prior, free, or informed consent of Indigenous Peoples, and without adequate acknowledgement of their ownership and rights over their narratives.

Addressing these gaps needs requires new ways of thinking about the responsibilities that media institutions hold and shifting archival practice towards partnership and restoration – returning Indigenous voices, stories, and cultures to the communities, families, and future generations to whom they belong.

The ABC Archives’ Kin and TwoWays programme, led by Indigenous Collection and Community Access Manager Tasha James, seeks to address these legacies by reconnecting archival material with traditional owners and reframing the archive as a space for healing, truth telling, and community leadership.

This roundtable will also draw on insights from Tasha’s recent participation in the PMA Trainer Grant scheme, which supported her visit to CBC/RadioCanada for an Indigenous Archive Knowledge Exchange.

This roundtable is designed for staff at PMA-member organisations and guests working with, or interested in: 

• Indigenous-led archival practice 
• Ethical custodianship of cultural material 
• Community access and attribution 
• Cross-cultural collaboration in public media
• Governance and responsibility in memory institutions 

Whether your organisation is already engaged in Indigenous archiving or is seeking to develop new approaches, your participation and insights will be invaluable. 

1. Indigenous collections and community access within ABC Archives, including the Kinnect and TwoWays programme
2. Community-led access and attribution
3. Human-rights storytelling
4. Truth archives and testimony preservation
5. Practical applications for public media organisations including metadata reform, recruitment and capacity building plus strengthening rights and consent protocols.
6. Future and emerging opportunities for collaboration, governance, and long-term stewardship.

Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions, share experiences, and discuss challenges with other attendees.

Tasha James is the Indigenous Collection and Community Access Manager at ABC Archives. She leads the Kin and TwoWays programme, which reconnects ABC-held archival material with traditional owners and ensures cultural knowledge holders are properly credited.Ways program, which reconnects ABC-held archival material with traditional owners and ensures cultural knowledge holders are properly credited.

Her work focuses on ethical cataloguing, metadata governance, and community-led access, and she has been a strong advocate for truth-telling and Indigenous sovereignty within archival practice. Through the PMA Trainer Grant scheme, she recently collaborated with CBC/Radio-Canada on Indigenous archiving and language revitalisation initiatives, contributing to ongoing cross-cultural learning between the organisations.