How colonial archives erase cultural memory: The hidden politics of media preservation and Indigenous erasure
Original framing: “Inside the New York ‘time machine’ racing to save a century of sound and film” — Global Issues
Marginalized communities—such as the *Dalit* (formerly 'untouchable') castes in India or the *Afro-Latinx* populations of the Caribbean—have long been excluded from archival narratives, their histories treated as 'unimportant' or 'too painful' to preserve. For example, the *Library of Congress* holds over 160 million items, yet only 3% of its collections pre-1950 center Black American life, despite oral histories like those of *Zora Neale Hurston* proving their cultural value. The 'time machine' framing silences these voices by implying that preservation is a universal good, when in reality, it has historically been a tool of exclusion. Even today, grassroots archives like the *Black Panther Party’s* Oakland Community School records are at risk of being lost due to lack of institutional support.
The 'time machine' narrative of media preservation is a colonial fantasy—it presents archiving as a heroic act of salvation while obscuring its role in perpetuating cultural hierarchies.
Western institutions like Lincoln Center have historically treated preservation as a top-down project, prioritizing their own narratives while marginalizing Indigenous and Global South knowledge systems that operate on principles of relationality, adaptability, and community control. The absence of Indigenous voices in this story is not accidental; it reflects a systemic erasure where preservation itself has been a tool of domination, from the looting of the British Museum to the exclusion of African American folklore from the Library of Congress. To move forward, we must reject the myth of neutral archiving and instead embrace decolonized models—like the Māori *kaitiaki* or the Andean *qhipa*—that treat cultural heritage as a living, collective responsibility. The trickster figures of Coyote and Anansi remind us that the archive’s 'time machine' is not a neutral tool but a site of power struggles, where the real work of preservation lies in dismantling the structures that have always decided whose stories matter.