Notes on Ellen Cushman, "Wampum, Sequoyan, and Story"

Cushman, Ellen. “Wampum, Sequoyan, and Story: Decolonizing the Digital Archive.” College English, vol. 76, no. 2, 2013, pp. 115–35. 

Like Browne's article, "Wampum, Sequoyan, and Story" is based on work on a digital archive. (Cushman's article came out first, so maybe I should say Browne's article is like hers...) 

Cushman's focus is on how the decolonial digital archive can unsettle Western colonialist archival knowledge-making. Western archives and museums work by tearing things away from their original contexts and away from the people who use and interact (and tell stories) about them. They also put them in a Eurocentric kind of timeline (museums especially do this) to show the "evolution" of practices throughout a Eurocentric history that (not surprisingly) puts Western practices at the top. As Cushman puts it,

Western thinking creates its own singular tradition by pointing to itself along a timeline hatch-marked within and against a plurality of traditions. Installations at museums typically include plaques to indicate the name of the item, its date, and its origin (if known). Using dates, archives and museums train their visitors to be epistemologically obedient to Western modernity’s concept of tradition. (119)

She gives the example of wampum belts, which are used during stomp dances by the Cherokee elders. Archives and museums wanted some, but if they have them, the belts would be separated from their use and treated as artifacts of the past, like dead objects representative of some indigenous past. With the digital archive and the "Four Worlds curriculum" that Cushman was helping to construct, the wampum belt can still mediate knowledge as part of living traditions that can be conveyed to listeners using the Cherokee language (as spoken and as written in Sequoyan). 

Cushman goes on to give another example of a lesson on the Cherokee Songs and Stories DVD, an illustrated story that is narrated in spoken Cherokee, with Sequoyan subtitles. The story she tells about is a traditional story about the origins of the Milky Way. The illustrations help learners understand the story even if they don't know much of the language. She writes that this approach is especially helpful when working together with a polysynthetic language like Cherokee, which "build[s] pictures around the roots of verbs using prefixes and affixes to describe the action unfolding" (124). The stories in the digital archive "provide something like an immersive experience in the language that has been central to Native people’s language preservation efforts for the past two decades" (124). This can lead to the recovery of the language, which has been in decline due to older generations being forced to give up using it. Cushman argues that the use of Cherokee also has the epistemic function "of introducing Cherokee language learners to a decolonial understanding of how knowledge is made through story" (126).

After a discussion of how the roles of the elders and listeners are important in the storytelling, and how they try to emphasize this in the digital archive, Cushman contrasts this kind of digital archive and the western archive to show how this represents "history told in and on Cherokee terms": "Rather than the archive being experienced through codification of an expert’s understanding of the artifact  decontextualized from its actual use, the work of storytelling in this digital archive asks participants to actively take up the knowledge, to continue the telling of it, and to position themselves in relationship to the era, the place, and the elder telling the story" (129). While she admits that "it is not at all clear how well any archival holding of a story or digital story can recreate the situation of storytelling" (131), Cushman concludes that they "can make accessible the stories and practices of storytelling in ways that honor indigenous enunciations of knowledge and help learners persevere in their culture and language" (132).