Leece Oliver LaRue
Emerging from two chronological projects with University of California (UC) in 2014 and 2015, the Sipnuuk Digital Archive digital platform started as a means of disseminating research and institutional knowledge ABOUT Karuk people BACK into Karuk community. A collective space for gathering cultural memory and knowledge, the Sipnuuk Digital Archive, Library, and Repository engages community archiving efforts with one of three remaining fluent speakers of the Karuk language and their apprentices to digitize archival language materials for community learning and use. The archive also holds materials and information about our Tribe, Relatives, and territory that has been put into “the record” as public knowledge by governmental agencies, institutions, companies, and researchers. The Sipnuuk Digital Archive utilizes Murkurtu Content Management System, an open source platform built in partnership with Maori People for Indigenous use. This system integrates Local Context Labels (Dr. Jane Anderson) and other database/data structure solutions to (re)attribute Karuk knowledge within the cultural protocols of our home communities. This presentation stories the origin of the Karuk Cultural Heritage and Traditional Knowledge Labels over the course of the development and continuation of our Sipnuuk site since 2016, and highlights recent work to include a Geospatial Data Label for use within ArcGIS and other similar geospatial web-services. Through utilization of the customizable Local Contexts Hub and application programming interface (API), we continue to advance the assertion of Karuk data sovereignty while navigating the ongoing use of Karuk data within digital spaces that come to contain Karuk cultural data.