ARLIS/NA 54th Annual Conference

Collective memory institutions have functioned as gatekeepers of Remenkeemi (Indigenous Egyptian) cultures and knowledges stolen and retold through colonizing tales and mythologies. Colonial institutions including libraries, archives, universities, and museums hold manuscripts and art in Metremenkeemi (language of the people of the Black Soil) written in several scripts (Hieroglyphic, Hieretic, Demotic, Coptic). Categorizing our Indigenous language and cultures as ‘ancient’ history violently erases the Niremenkeemi's centuries long fight to survive through art, oral histories, and familial practices. Indigenous languages and sacred artifacts held within colonial institutions are undervalued, severed, categorized as dead historical artifacts, and remain inaccessible for revitalization efforts.

The language revival process we embarked upon is a land-based practice reconnecting colonized and displaced north Africans with the lands and ancestors that made them. We share how language revival through varied art practices is a form of archiving that preserves our language as both a cultural praxis and acts of living. Further, our multigenerational engagement and outreach through language and art programming to build our living archive connects Niremenkeemi across generations strengthening our language revival process.

This pre-coordinated session includes three Niremenkeemi (Egyptian people) language revival journeyers who carry and intersect the skills of archiving, art-making, and scholarship to explore art and visual literacy as a simultaneously archiving and reviving tool for ancestral languages and the teachings woven within. We explore Metremenkeemi’s expressions and archives through art and share the collective journey we have embarked upon through ancestral language lessons, cultural revival, and at this time, art to propel us further into our language as a day-to-day praxis. Working against the dominance of gatekeeping and access, this panel shares examples of the various artworks, writings, and alternative publications being created by Niremenkeemi through our language revival arts project.

We also share the many ways colonial memory institutions gatekeep our ancestral scripts and sacred artifacts. Many are catalogued as ‘rare’ and remain imprisoned within inaccessible special collections. We reflect on the ways that digital platforms allow us to undo some of that gatekeeping. For example, the Living Keemi website and online video meeting platforms enabled us to participate in language lessons across time zones. Recording/archiving lessons by our language keeper allow sharing our language with artists needed for our language revival process. Simultaneously, we are navigating the precarity of digital preservation and planning around the colonizing tendencies of predatory technology. Our process requires an ethics of care as we introduce artists to the language, engage in art making, plan a hybrid art exhibit, and decolonize approaches for archiving and sharing language revival art.

Language revival is an indigenization process that resists erasure and initiates healing from colonial violence and trauma. Learning our ancestral language allows us to access our ancestral wisdoms and knowledges, for language holds the nuances and analogies that make meaning out of the world around us. At its core Indigenous language revival as an archival process decenters colonialism and white supremacy and advocates for social justice while opening portals towards new world making and healing.

About the moderator:
Erika DeFreitas is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes performance, photography, video, installation, textiles, drawing and writing. Placing emphasis on gesture, process, the body, documentation and paranormal phenomena, DeFreitas mines concepts of loss, post-memory, legacy and objecthood. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. DeFreitas holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.