The First Publication

Today, the first access point to the Labrador Mission Stations collection is available via the Moravian Archives Findbuch platform. This is a major milestone for our project. But as these digital versions of these records become accessible, it is a good moment to reflect on our process in the Uncommon Bonds project and some of the work our Advisory Committee has been doing to ensure meaningful, informed and community-defined access.

Achieving this kind of access is never straightforward. And with colonial records there are added layers of complexity. While documents like the National Inuit Strategy on Research and emerging, related data management practices in the Nunatsiavut Government give us higher level goals and objectives about data concerning Inuit, many of the policies and recommendations at this level do not neatly square with the types of records we are digitizing. The issue is one of context. These records were mostly created and managed by missionaries working within Labrador Inuit Lands over a 225-year period. Emerging best-practices concerning data sovereignty tend to preference recent forms records that extract traditional or local knowledge. While there is an abundance of traditional and local knowledge in these records, accessing it requires an investment on the part of the users.

To give a concrete example, if a user was interested in traditional land-use practices, there are no records here that directly capture the subject. However, if a user is familiar with the administrative structure of the church, fluent in German and had time, they might first reference Statistics and Accounts records for the various stations. From there, they could survey the Annual Reports from each of the mission stations published in the Periodical Accounts that and from there move on the records of the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives (the HBC purchased the church’s trade operations in 1926). None of these sets of records directly captures the subject of traditional land use, but it is a subject that is well represented through records intended to serve other purposes.

Context is also complicated by the shifting role of the church over the course of 225 years. As our co-principal investigator Paul Peucker has written, “archives” were a concern of the Labrador missionaries since at least 1773 when Brother Paul Eugen Layritz gave instruction to the Nain missionaries on the organization and maintenance of the mission’s archive, down to the development of a blueprint for an archival cabinet.^[1] The management of “archives” remained the historical domain of the missionaries until the 1980s when local museums and historical societies such as Piulimatsivik Nain Museum, the Agvituk Sivumuak Society in Hopedale and the White Elephant Museum in Makkovik became involved. As the church stopped sending missionaries to Labrador, many of its administrative functions in the region were taken on by our partner, the Moravian Church in Newfoundland and Labrador, which was established in 1980. But without local missionaries to facilitate access, it became more difficult for Labrador Inuit to use these local archives. In the prolonged absence of use, traditional use practices become difficult to revive.

All of this context matters as it has helped our Advisory Committee to articulate what we believe is meaningful, informed and community-defined access. Our curatorial policies and protocols around access are emerging and we will be using this website to document them as they continue to emerge throughout the life of the project. For now, though, these are the principles, policies and protocols that have shaped our approach to access.

• The original curatorial context for these records is impossible to recreate, nor is it desirable to recreate that context.

• The scale of the records included in this collection far exceeds the original, local curatorial context. Communities would have access to their own records, not necessarily the records of other communities.

• There is a greater use value for all users of these records (especially Labrador Inuit) by having access to digitized versions.

• Labrador Inuit interest and oversight of these records is the appropriate domain of both the Moravian Church in Newfoundland and Labrador and the Nunatsiavut Government. This is consistent with emerging co-management practices of both organizations concerning Moravian records in Labrador.

• While each of the publication platforms for the records in this project are meant to serve different audiences, it is essential that there is Labrador Inuit oversight over these records. For this publication, the Moravian Church in Newfoundland and Labrador has performed a spot check of the genres of records that may contain sensitive information.

• Per the Moravian Archives’ in-house policy, records less than seventy years of age that contain information concerning individuals will not be made public. There are no records of this nature in the collection.

• The present publication is directed towards users that are more interested in and familiar with global Moravian records.

• Users of the present publication will benefit from the Finding Aid to the collection.

We look forward to receiving your feedback on this first publication. Please feel free to share it with us here, via email, or our Twitter account.

Mark David Turner

^[1] Paul Peucker, “Labrador Records at the Unity Archives in Herrnhut, Germany,” in Moravian Beginnings in Labrador: Papers from a Symposium held in Makkovik and Hopedale, Newfoundland and Labrador Studies Occasional Publication No. 2 (2009): 152-61.