摘要：Settler archives are situated across the U.S. and housed within institutions such as university campuses. They were invented and placed strategically to help attune the world both to ideal representations of knowledge, understanding, and humanity and to their promises of salvation, progress, and development. In this essay, I argue settler archives importantly provide a window into the Western imaginary and the epistemic experiments that have had the structural and material consequences of devaluing and eliminating the co-existence of histories, memories, and knowledge and understanding; of inventing and then rendering the other absent or excessively visible; and of couching the possibility of the other’s humanization only by their conversion to Christianity, civilization, and/or modernization. I claim they can both help us establish a connection between past and present epistemic rhetorical activities and issues and be used as important mediums for decolonial thinking and doing.
