 Hey, everyone. You're at Oman, Nindugi, a Nathan Mugi sentence. You're a Nadi. Where I'd you give a Baldu, Mugi, Galandi. Hello, my name is Nathan Sence. I'm a Waiju man. My family is from the Waiju Nation, which is one of 300 Aboriginal nations off Australia. It's the largest nation of New South Wales. So that's a pretty cool way. But yeah, I'm a Waiju man. My family is from a place that's now called Bathurst in New South Wales. My great-grandmother lost her family, my ancestors, in the Bathurst War in the early to mid-1800s, then she was relocated to Mugi in New South Wales, which is not that far from Bathurst, where she worked as a domestic servant. She got married at the age of 13. And because the church would not let her get married under a traditional name, her real name, they gave her a name. And they gave her the name Dinah Mugi. Dinah just because it's a very general sort of Christian name and Mugi because that's the town that she lives. So her name was Dinah Mugi. Mugi, I hypothesize, comes from the Waiju word Mugi, which means friend or mate. So that's why I actually call myself Nathan Mugi Sentence, to repurpose and reclaim a name that was imposed on my grandmother. As for myself, I grew up on Darkinjung Country on the New South Wales Central Coast. It's about an hour 40 from Sydney, where my dad helped with the establishment of the Eleanor Duncan Aboriginal Health Service, which later became urine. And my first job was actually at the Darkinjung Aboriginal Local Land Council, where I worked as an archival assistant. I've been in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, or GLAM, for close to 10 years. And I started at the State Library in New South Wales in the Indigenous Services Branch there, where I was helping find how archives and libraries can assist with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language revitalization, which is a big sort of issue in Australia, out of the 300 or more known languages pre-invasion, only about 20 are spoken comprehensively. According to census data, only about 12% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders speak their language at their home. So my job was trying to locate Aboriginal language content within our collections, and make that material more accessible to linguists and other people that are working on language revitalization. I also worked on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander collecting strategy at the State Library in New South Wales, which was about trying to help Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities control their representation into the future, and to ensure that State Library doesn't just collect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history that's in the past, but to collect contemporary stuff to be added to recorded memory. And also, now I work at the Australian Museum on Gadigal Country in Sydney as a First Nations programming officer, mostly facilitating First Nations programs such as events and workshops, and this includes Yalu Wauri-Mauri, which in the Sydney language means we stand strong, and that's a night that celebrates Aboriginal resistance and protest. It's a night event in response to Jan 26, which in Australia is commonly referred to as Australia Day, but to many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, it's called Invasion Day or Survival Day, and so similar to Columbus Day in America. So we actually have a night event that privileges First Nations voices off the night, and they can be in either poetry. Last year we had banner making for the Invasion Day protest march, and different sort of talks and events, but because there is a lot of debate around that date, but in the mainstream a lot of that debate actually does not privilege First Nations voices, so that's what I try to do at the Australian Museum for that event. And also earlier this year, we hosted our inaugural Wee Festival, which was a month-long festival of programming to celebrate First Nations culture and history, and that included we collaborated with our Pacific team to incorporate our Pacific brothers and sisters into that event. But my work at my museum is actually not why I'm here. I'm here because I started a blog in the middle of 2017 about my thoughts and experiences working in galleries, libraries, and archives as a raggedy man. I called it the Archival Decolonist. This is where I like to say that the views expressed on my blog and in this talk are my own and do not reflect my employer. I also like to state that I do not believe I'm the only voice to express these views. Or the first, or the most sophisticated, but I'm the voice that is here today. And my ability to express my voice about the glam sector was made possible by the many First Nations uncles and aunties that were in the sector before me and my brothers and sisters working hard in the sector today. I'm really standing on the shoulders of giants. I think my feelings are better encapsulated by this quote by Palakoo Academic Amblin Coral Milia. There are several reasons why I started my blog. Firstly, to create discussions, but on my terms. There are many issues that I've experienced working in glam as an Aboriginal man. However, it can be hard discussing these issues because in glam I'm often in the minority which can heavily affect how these discussions play out as my voice can be perceived as arbitrarily antagonistic or the opinion or preference of one person, not a critique based on my lived experience or the many conversations I've had with my fellow First Nations community members about structural issues that affect us. This can lead to my voice being easily ignored or undermined in these exchanges. I'm also very soft spoken which can undercut my message. Thus, I think for me my blog is a more effective way I can start these conversations with glam professionals outside the framework of being a minority voice and be heard. Secondly, my blog allows me to discuss in a firm non-confrontational manner how Eurocentric bias can manifest itself in glam and impress non-Western knowledges. For example, occasionally in the Dewey decibel system, the most used library classification system in the world, Aboriginal creation stories come under the number 398.2049915 which is Aboriginal myths and legends. However, Christian creation stories do not get classified under Christian myths and legends. Aboriginal culture is a living culture and many First Nations people believe their creation story just as Christians do as fact and the method of how we classify our First Nations cultural heritage should reflect that. Thirdly, I started my blog because there are no gatekeepers to my blog. No editors, though I could use one. Nevertheless, there's no filter which is something I've experienced before. For example, recently I was asked to write something about James Cook for a glam related thing and I wrote that he represents the start of invasion to many First Nations people. And this was changed without consultation with me too. James Cook represents the start of the colonial encounter to many First Nations people. I felt that this language was soft and dishonest but I can understand why it was chosen and that was out of fear of any potential backlash caused by settler fragility. I do not have to care about catering for settler fragility with my blog. Lastly, my blog gives me time to reflect and articulate my thoughts and this is very helpful as it allows me to meticulously explain why I think certain things should be improved. For instance, I can't off the top of my head describe the complexities of Aboriginal identity or how poor metadata of First Nations cultural objects in museums has led to First Nations culture being perceived in a simplified manner which has assisted our historic dehumanization. It also allows me to provide evidence as I can hyperlink my blog to citations and statistics but I can't in my speech. My blog has touched on many subjects that I find interesting such as when librarians teach information literacy. I think this should include a discussion on the power dynamics in archives and libraries collections. So users don't just critically evaluate the sources they use but also the historical context that these sources were created in. My blog has also discussed how the way we describe cultural heritage objects and the way we convey their stories often de-centres First Nations people in their own story and devalues them as creators and custodians of their own history by placing them as subjects. An example of this was when I first started working at the Australian Museum. In the entrance we used to have these rainforest shields as soon as you walked in and they were beautiful but I looked at the label of the rainforest shields and they would say, you know, rainforest shield far north Queensland made with wood. That was basically, and then it would say, this shield was collected by Dr Walter Roth who was the protector of Aborigines in Queensland from this period, this period. So even though this shield was beautiful, the story that surrounded that shield was not being told and actually the story of Dr Walter Roth who was the protector of Aboriginal people which is a whole different thing but that's the story that we chose to tell with that shield. And the response to my blog has been interesting. At first I was just getting things off my chest and didn't think anyone would care or listen besides my dad and a few museum and library friends but many people have responded to it and it's been added to one University of Sydney history class and has been selected to be preserved by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. The response to my blog has given me lots of optimism. As I said at the start of the talk, I'm not the first person to express many of the views on my blog but for some of my readers it's the first time that they've seen them and they've expressed interest to learn more. So here's like one of the sort of responses I've received on my blog and additionally I've received responses like this. I'll show you another, and this was an email from a fellow First Nations glam professional and while my blog is about the ways in which I think glam can change, it's also expressing to my fellow First Nations people that work in this sector that we are not alone in this. And what do I hope people take away from my blog? By sharing my experiences, by sharing the literature I'm reading, I hope my blog helps people to challenge and disrupt whiteness as the default or the neutral. For instance, I was recently talking to a settler curator how it's becoming more common in Australia for exhibitions to include the relevant First Nations languages and she said that she was worried that this could be confusing to for exhibition visitors. Undoubtedly she was talking about white settlers when she was saying visitors and my initial reaction was not everything's about you. But exhibitions have been in many cases about her as her epistemology, her experiences, her language I consider the default in mainstream settler society and therefore reflecting a majority of exhibitions. And because of this she's more concerned with potential settler discomfort caused by confusion than the suppression of First Nations languages. And this also can imply that settlers are the intended audience for all First Nations output from libraries, archives and museums. And this default can go unnoticed by a majority of people and so I hope my blog posts help people see it and challenge it to stop perpetuating the myth of glam neutrality. We need to stop this because if glam organizations are neutral then their Eurocentrism is neutral as well which continues First Nations people and our knowledge being framed as the other. This makes it harder to challenge and change white privilege and institutional racism within memory institutions and society more broadly. Additionally, if being neutral means shunning involvement in movements that challenge oppressive structures then some would argue that glam organizations in attempting to be neutral have assisted the oppressor and are complicit with oppressive structures. Furthermore, I actually think this makes glam organizations and memory institutions less effective in creating social change which therefore makes them less socially relevant. I also think we need to question who is being centered. I recently saw a discussion at an academic symposium in Australia and one of the discussions was actually called Decolonizing Cultural Institutions where only one of the four speakers on the topic was a First Nations person meaning that three quarters of the discussion around decolonizing was actually filled with thoughts and opinions of colonizers. Essentially colonizing a space around decolonizing. This could only continue the thinking that frames white scholars as the knowers of First Nations people and culture and frames First Nations people ourselves and our culture as the known or subjects. The question of who is being centered and whose voice is being privileged must be asked with all our exhibitions and the programs. To advocate for the pluralization and decolonization of glam education I'm a glam student and a new professional and most of the followers of my blog are glam students and new professionals particularly library and archive students and while a lot of the content of my blog might be old ideas for many of you I can see a desire for diverse and radical voices in glam education and I hope my blog cause attention to the lack of diverse, especially in Australia First Nations voices in glam education and inspires a change and also to create to work forward to a glam education that is completely focused on preserving history in the Western way to expand your cultural values. What is valuable to my community might not be valuable to you and vice versa but this can affect many aspects of glam. For instance, I was recently talking to a First Nations cultural practitioner and senior knowledge holder and he had been taking photos of his local community gatherings and events for the last couple of years and he had massed nearly a thousand photographs of his community and he told me he offered these photographs to a few glam organisations so that the contemporary history of his community could be part of mainstream recorded memory. One glam organisation said they would add them to their collection but only a hundred of the nearly a thousand photographs taken and which photographs would be added would be chosen by the non-Indigenous collection manager which of course isn't intrinsically a bad thing but they chose photos they thought were the most valuable which was influenced by their world view as a settler in mainstream settler society and this was without much consideration of what the community themselves consider valuable and maintains an established practice of outsiders choosing our First Nations people are represented in history. Because of this historic collections worldwide are mostly filled with the voices of rich white men. My blog asked readers to consider how their values and the values of mainstream settler society affect glam collections and history more broadly. Also to challenge the notion that glam organisation is inherently good. Similar to neutrality there's a perception that glam organisations are inherently good. In regards to First Nations people and culture this perception manifests itself with ideas like the one I often hear is isn't it great that this collection item is in this glam collection because if it wasn't it would be lost forever. I have many issues with that concept mainly that memory institutions such as museums and archives are part of colonisation and culture loss was not a problem before colonisation. Furthermore archives and museums along with researchers have proliferated a colonial gender which led to many First Nations people being seen as savages and subhumans which helped justify our mass displacement of forced assimilation and the stolen generations which for like in Australia the stolen generations is quite well known now but it was sort of the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families particularly Aboriginal children of mixed descent with the idea that AO Neville the Protector of Aboriginals in Western Australia wrote that the intention basically was to give these Aboriginal children civilisation but also to because they're already of mixed descent then we can basically by his quote he said breed the black out of them. So that was the intention of the stolen generations but it was easily justified by the idea that Aboriginal people weren't taking care of their children because Aboriginal people were savages and nothing in museum exhibitions actually fought against that nothing about it said anything otherwise. If you went to museum exhibitions you could see Aboriginal people and they seemed savage. There are many examples of how this affected culture with the stolen generation many stolen children could only speak English on missions and reserves and upon a shift they didn't and additionally a lot of cultural knowledge is localised and connected to a certain place so if displaced from country it's harder for that information to be transferred and while memory institutions are now assisting many communities strengthen their culture they need to acknowledge their role in weakening that culture as well as the fact their existence and the cultural heritage in their collections is due to colonisation and colonisation is what is trying to destroy First Nations culture. Furthermore First Nations people can preserve their own history and did so before museums. For example there are some First Nations stories from South Queensland that talk about they're called sea rice stories and actually talk about events that happened 12,000 years ago which have just recently been proven to be true. Just even in my nation, the Maori nation we used to have crocodiles be part of our creation stories and when the first Europeans actually heard those they actually laughed because there's no crocodiles in New South Wales really but recently they've just done some excavations and they found crocodile skeletons that are at least 1200 years old so our creation stories are sort of predated and our oral histories predate what people think oral histories can do. So, yeah and also the collecting of cultural heritage in Glam has been flawed. This is a quote from my Aunty Grace and it encapsulates the fact that galleries, libraries, archives and museums in many cases have not captured the contextual information about our collections. This could be because a lot of cultural heritage ends up in collections because it was recorded by colonisers or taken by colonisers without much inquiry. This leads to paintings and galleries that may depict a ceremony, however it does not understand what the ceremony is about or a shield in a museum that does not say the story that it's meant to convey or what localised knowledge it stems from. There's lots of shields in our collection that say stuff like shield from Western New South Wales and it's like, what does that mean? Where's that from? The place of Western New South Wales has about 50 different nations on it. We also, you know, language manuscripts in our archives have misinterpreted language. One of the famous ones is in the Sydney language. One of the words recorded for rock was gibbier and for a long time that's what people would think the Sydney language word for rock was. Talking to a Sydney elder they were saying that's actually a particular rock for a particular ceremony so to actually just call it gibbier is actually a very dumbing down of what the cultural meaning of that rock, that particular rock and dumbing down of that word. So those sort of things just lead to sort of our culture being seen in a simplified way but also a lot of people will say that our culture exists in these collections for a cultural exchange but if we don't have those stories then we're actually not succeeding in that way. We're actually not providing a cultural exchange because we're actually not providing the cultural aspects of the objects that we hold. All the above lead to cultural heritage objects not being as useful in cultural violation or cultural preservation. Yeah, with only the tangible heritage being preserved without the intangible heritage means that only a fragment of culture is actually being preserved. Going forward, I will continue my blog for the same reason I will continue my work in GLAM and it might be a reason that might be unique to members of minority groups and that is my communal responsibilities or my responsibilities to my community. As I said earlier, I'm soft-spoken and my blog helps me add to a discourse and stand with my First Nations brothers and sisters within and outside these establishments. I will continue my blog and create more conversations around GLAM and as for who's driving the conversation. For me, I like to think that even though it's me writing it's my father and my ancestors. Mandenguru, thank you.