Two‐eyed‐seeing/Etuaptmumk in the colonial archive: Reflections on participatory archival research.

Due to their origins and purpose, institutional archives present us with a set of limits when we seek to use them in struggles against colonialism. Here we explore to what extent we can negotiate those limits and practice participatory historical research. In particular, we explore how our project's direction by Indigenous methodology, a Two‐Eyed Seeing approach, influenced our relationship with the colonial archive. The research reported on in this paper involved establishing a historical narrative from Canadian federal and provincial colonial archives. This narrative was used in conjunction with oral histories from and interviews with Elders and Knowledge‐holders of the Mi'kmaq Nation to document the emergence of social assistance policy as a central aspect of colonial processes. Our historical research was, thus, explicitly tied to understanding the Mi'kmaw struggle for sovereignty in the colonial present. Here we sketch out aspects of our attempt to navigate between the colonial past and colonial present using a participatory approach to the historical geographies of Indigenous–settler relations. This paper investigates the limitations, opportunities, and contradictions of using colonial archives for decolonial purposes. It does so through a case study of research conducted with the Mi'kmaq First Nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]