Towards a Gerontology of the Archive: Indigenous Queer and Two-Spirit HIV/AIDS Memory and Aging Justice

This article reimagines archival care as a form of aging justice, examining how the preservation—or neglect—of Indigenous HIV/AIDS memory shapes Indigenous queer and Two-Spirit (IQ2S) futures, particularly for those aging with HIV. Drawing together influences from Black and Indigenous critical speculative methodologies, we examine a beaded IQ2S AIDS pendant and syringe packaged in a Ziploc bag currently held in the archives of Queer History Boston. We use this package, and its lack of provenance, as an entry point into a broader critique of archival silences surrounding IQ2S histories. We argue that the absence of information about this pendant exemplifies how IQ2S cultural belongings are routinely displaced from their relational contexts, mishandled, or left uncared for within dominant Western archival confines—practices that reduce the life of IQ2S materials to objects available for colonial extraction. In this way, archival neglect becomes not only a historical failure but a contemporary injustice that shapes how IQ2S people are remembered, cared for, and imagined into futures of Eldership. This, we contend, has far-reaching consequences for gerontological research and aging care. We conclude by proposing a framework for a gerontological approach to the archive that shifts preservation toward relational care, asking how we might tend to IQ2S belongings as living relatives whose interrupted histories nonetheless carry responsibilities to past, present, and future generations.