To Every Artifact Its Voice: Creating Surrogates for Hand-Crafted Indigenous Objects

This article reports on findings from qualitative research undertaken with a group of Aboriginal seniors in Toronto, Canada, to assess how a community-based collection of handcrafted objects could be used to evoke memories of maker culture (craft), as well as to foster meaning-making—all in the course of gathering elements requisite to representing each item in a documented surrogate. The article will discuss how the need to give voice to this unique collection both challenges and enriches traditional approaches to representing and organizing artifacts. A rethinking of surrogate records that center the Indigenous experience in the cataloging process is proposed.