by Noa Sanders

As Rise Up approaches its tenth anniversary, we’re reflecting not only on what’s been accomplished but also on how we can deepen our commitments to justice and solidarity. Engaging with an archive is as much about the present as it is about the past. Rise Up’s collection has long documented diverse feminist activism in Canada—but inclusion and representation alone are not enough. The ethics of how materials are acquired, described, preserved, and shared must take centre stage. As archival scholar Michelle Caswell puts it:

“The goal of community-based archival efforts should not just be to document a more representative view of history, nor just to recuperate a forgotten past as filtered through the identity categories of the present, but to mobilize traces of the past—however painful, however unnerving—to build a more socially just future.”

To take up this call, archives across Canada—from large institutional repositories like Library and Archives Canada to small, community-based archives like Rise Up—must confront the colonial foundations of archival practice. In 2022, the Steering Committee on Canada’s Archives published the Reconciliation Framework: The Response to the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Taskforce, authored by a team of dedicated non-Indigenous archivists and First Nations, Inuit, and Métis heritage professionals.

The Reconciliation Framework provides Rise Up with a roadmap toward building a decolonial archival practice. The framework’s core objective of relationship building forms the foundation of all aspects of archival work—from appraisal and acquisition, to arrangement and description, to access and outreach. Ensuring a more representative historical record can only emerge from establishing and maintaining meaningful relationships with the members of the communities whose voices have been excluded from the record in the first place, or (mis)represented in harmful ways.

Guided by our commitments to anti-racism and anti-colonialism, Rise Up has launched a multi-stage process to embed the framework’s principles into our work:

• Audit and Assessment: We’re conducting a full audit of our archival collection to assess how materials by or about First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples are described and arranged, and to determine whether they were acquired with free, prior, and informed consent.
• Discoverability and Access: We’re identifying content that is embedded in periodicals or lacking clear description, making it difficult to find. This will inform the creation of finding aids that improve accessibility while honouring provenance and community protocols.
• Policy Review: We’re updating our donor agreements, copyright statements, and description practices to center Indigenous intellectual sovereignty and OCAP® (Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession).
• Community Consultation: We’re beginning to reach out to First Nations, Inuit, and Métis individuals and communities represented in our archive to determine consent, seek direction around description and access, and establish collaborative custodianship. 
• Relationship Building: We’re developing capacity within our volunteer-based collective to create and maintain lasting, trust-based relationships central to this work.

This is a collective effort, and it touches every part of Rise Up’s operations. We know this work is not linear, and we expect to be challenged and changed by it. As a feminist archive, our responsibility is clear: to move beyond reproducing colonial practices, and toward creating an archival space that honours Indigenous sovereignty, histories, and knowledge systems.

The reconciliation framework supports broader efforts within Rise Up to bring our actions into alignment with our commitments to equity and social justice and to repair any harm caused by the failure to attend to power dynamics in the present. This is necessary for Rise Up to “mobilize traces of the past […] to build a more socially just future.”

As a volunteer-run archive, this process will take time, but we’re committed to what Kimberly Christen and Jane Anderson (co-founders of Local Contexts) call “slow archives,” an approach to archiving that involves “focusing differently, listening carefully, and acting ethically.” In their words: 

“[Slowing down] opens the possibility of seeing the intricate web of relationships formed and forged through attention to collaborative curation processes that do not default to normative structures of attribution, access, or scale […] By purposefully keeping colonial structures and practices in our view—as they are manifest in our institutions, policies, practices, and technologies—we can begin the work of tearing them down and building anew.”