Abstract:
Indigenous and other marginalized folk art traditions are frequently oral, embodied,
and relational, transmitted through apprenticeship, kinship, and ceremony rather than
through the fixed, written curricula that formal academic institutions are built to process;
when such traditions enter universities, standard practice has been to translate them into
the archive’s own terms, stripped of restricted or seasonal knowledge, a process that
reproduces the extractive logic colonial ethnography once used to collect indigenous
material without consent. This is the research problem the paper addresses. Its objective
is to examine whether digital archiving and folk art pedagogy can instead be organized
around community authority rather than institutional convenience, and to propose a
practical framework for doing so. The paper adopts a qualitative, desk-based methodology,
purposively synthesizing archival and data-governance literature, culturally sustaining
pedagogy, and documented Indigenous-led archiving practice through thematic analysis
to identify recurring points of convergence. Drawing on Mukurtu, the Traditional
Knowledge (TK) Labels developed through Local Contexts, the CARE Principles for
Indigenous Data Governance, and culturally sustaining pedagogy, the paper develops
a three-part framework, consent, custodianship, and curriculum, for introducing oral
folk art traditions into formal academic spaces while preserving community control
over what is recorded, who may access it, and under what conditions it circulates. The
key finding is that this convergence is achievable, but that it requires institutions to
accept real limits on what can be recorded, published, or counted as scholarly output, and
to remain alert to the risk that AI-driven cataloguing tools may compound rather than
resolve these problems unless governed by the same community-authority principles.
The paper concludes with recommendations for curriculum design, faculty governance,
and technical infrastructure that treat cultural autonomy as a design requirement rather
than an ethical afterthought.
