n.archival practices that support flexibility, building relationships, and collaboration, especially when remediating prior harmful practicesChristen and Anderson 2019, 87Our emphasis is on one mode of decolonizing processes that insist on a different temporal framework: the slow archives. Slowing down creates a necessary space for emphasizing how knowledge is produced, circulated, and exchanged through a series of relationships.Christen and Anderson 2019, 99It is in the slowing down that we can start to see modes of ethical archives that reflect accountability, engagement, relationality, and reciprocity that work alongside, within, and in opposition to settler structures and archival logics of displacement and dispossession. These are the principles underpinning our call for slow archives—frameworks that untangle and reposition archival practices as part of Indigenous temporalities and territorialities disrupting, disordering, and refuting standard archival practices and techniques. Slow archives call attention to the multiplicity and plurality of knowledge, storying, placedness, and relational events without reducing practices or systems to binary logics of control or submission, past or present, authority or victim. At the same time, an ethical view of slow archives calls attention to ongoing relations of respect and reciprocity—in practice and in the processes that allow for alternative distributions of control.Payne 2022, 179Rectifying archival harm is an inherently person-centred practice that represents a call for the type of slow archives that makes space and time to build relationships wherein harm may be repaired.Punzalan and Marsh 2022, 53Slow archives—a term coined by Kimberly Christen and Jane Anderson to describe one possible avenue for decolonizing practices and methodologies in archival institutions; the model recognizes that “focusing differently, listening carefully, and acting ethically” as well as true “collaborative curation” in archival contexts will require even further slowing down of, and flexibility in, archival processes.Yale 2025We embrace slow archives by pursuing flexible practices that allow for changing course, and for prioritizing collaborative relationships with community stakeholders.
