“Make your mark”: Black and Indigenous youth interventions in memory stewardship

Memory is a phenomenon that most people experience, yet youth do not have any home to claim in Archives or memory work. Youth voices and practices on memory have been studied, but Archives and memory work scholars do not consult youth on their own ethical and curatorial needs (Poyntz, Citation2021). This is important in a fragmented world that undergoes multiple, simultaneous crises; to remember is to resist and to dream. This work seeks to reveal the memory practices of Black and Indigenous young people as they design and dream about archiving and other practices of assemblage. In so doing, I will discuss the ways in which memory enables the activation of Black and Indigenous youth ontologies through a lens of memory work and epistemic justice. This work follows the creation of a youth co-led archive on youth activism, Land, and participatory materials. This project employed Youth Participatory Action Research as a method, which allowed for co-theorizing and co-researching alongside youth with the aim of empowering youth to identify issues and research solutions (Fine et al., Citation2021). This work seeks to bring Black and Indigenous youth voices in conversation with archivy and education as a departure from the violence that these domains have inflicted on Black and Indigenous people. Young people invite us to grow futures from the seeds they and their ancestors have sown. Taking up their invitation, I will share the ways in which the youth and I have co-theorized youth memory as a challenge to settler narratives of belonging and adultism.