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When I speak of orientations, let us be clear from the outset that I am presuming a standpoint east of the Roman Empire. To orient, as decolonial scholar Rocío Quispe-Agnoli reminds, is to begin from the locus of the Roman Empire, the seat of the Western epistemic, and to look toward the Orient, a word that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was "originally used with reference to countries lying immediately to the east of the Mediterranean or Southern Europe (i.e. east of the Roman Empire)."
To say that this special issue presents reorientations to the text, then, shifts the direction of gaze on textual production and consumption but still presumes a Western interpretive standpoint. In this article I describe a digital archive project that must necessarily ¿e-orient from the Western epistemic standpoint to view indigenous language manuscripts from positions original to and still unfolding in the Americas. Doing so, the digital archiving project I describe will extend and build upon the reading, writing, and teaching practices with texts written or spoken in indigenous languages in an effort to develop collective and shared practices with the text as technology useful for sustaining peoples' understandings of themselves in and on their own terms.1
As part of my consulting work with the Cherokee Nation Johnson O'Malley (JOM) Program between 2010 and 2012, I was asked to organize a team of Cherokee scholars (Tom Holm, Leslie Hannah, Kathryn England and Chris Teuton) to help develop a curriculum based on the teachings of a selection of the Cherokee wampum belts. When one of the wampum belts was unethically obtained by a national museum, our elders decided to stop reading them at stomp grounds and have since kept them in secret locations. The Cherokee Nation thought it was important to continue these teachings. In helping to write the curriculum, I understood the activist work necessary in telling stories as a central facet of persevering in indigenous languages. Regardless of the material artifacts that prompt stories, be they wampum belts, manuscripts in digital archives, or social networking sites, decolonizing the archive begins with attention to the ways in which archives were imperialist creations to begin with. As soon as the word archive is used, it evokes four imperialist tenets of thought:...