Designed with Care: Mukurtu Provides Ethical Tools for Archiving and Preservation of Indigenous Heritage

At her desk in Hoonah, Alaska, Amelia Wilson is creating a 2025 wall calendar illustrated with photographs of the local Tlingit community. A small fishing village on an island about 40 “air miles” by plane from Juneau, Hoonah is home to the largest Tlingit Native community in the world. 

“We have about 850 people here,” says Wilson, who is a member of the Chookaneidí brown bear clan and executive director of the Huna Heritage Foundation, a nonprofit that educates about local cultures and customs. “We’re steeped in history and culture, and we’ve been in the region for at least 10,000 years. But my dad as a clan leader would tell me, ‘We’ve been here since time before memory.’” 

That Wilson has access to old pictures to sift through at all is due, in large measure, to Mukurtu, a free open-source content management system that the Huna Heritage Foundation uses for its website and, in turn, populates with oral histories, historical maps, and digitized archival photos given by community members. Mukurtu is also a digital repository for images from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and the National Museum of the American Indian, among other institutions.  

Developed and launched in 2007, Mukurtu was spearheaded by Kim Christen, the founding director of the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation at Washington State University (WSU). Christen built Mukurtu in partnership with the Warumungu and other Indigenous communities around the world to enable telling their own stories and histories, rather than have others tell them. 

Mukurtu is designed to support an ethically based approach to preservation with the specific needs of Indigenous and Native collections in mind. For example, the system has “cultural protocols,” allowing communities to control access to sensitive and private intellectual property on a tiered basis. Traditional Knowledge or “TK” labels are tags of information that provide context and cultural understanding that may only be offered by firsthand or tribal knowledge. 

“Mukurtu itself is not just a technology or a platform or a piece of software,” says Christen. “It’s a social network; a cultural platform. It’s one tool in a toolkit for communities to use to repatriate, to safeguard, to create, to grow, to continue advocating for their cultural practices, their traditional knowledge-sharing with future generations.” 
 
The Tlingit of Hoonah are one such community: its members have been collecting artifacts related to their history since at least 1990. In recent years, members have made sharing those artifacts a priority.  

“It’s not enough to preserve, we want to provide access,” Wilson says. “That was the intent of our elders and all those that came before us in preserving our history and our culture, so that it is passed on.” 
 
Figuring out how to do that led Wilson to Mukurtu, and to WSU. There, she participated in their tribal stewardship cohort program, learning about metadata (data that provide context for an object or artifact), search engine optimization, archiving, and other facets of website creation, curation, and maintenance.  

In Mukurtu’s model, this practical training in digital archiving, preservation, and publishing is offered alongside learning about how professional archivists and stewards of Indigenous histories and artifacts apply and use these tools to meet the unique needs of Native communities. Specifically, that means learning about a wide range of topics: data storage and how to create sustainable agreements with large institutions to repatriate or return Indigenous materials to their original holders. It means learning about digitization and how to establish taxonomies and file-naming systems that use and respect native cultures and languages as the dynamic systems they are. 

Expanding training and ensuring Mukurtu’s long-term sustainability are core to the project. Supported in part by Mellon funding, it will expand its regional hubs, anchored by individuals who, like Wilson, train at WSU and then return home to train local community members in turn. The Mukurtu team will also design and implement free, self-guided online courses for users to take advantage of the platform, thereby growing its potential reach by a global user base. 

“In Australia, there’s a lot of work happening around descriptive practices,” says Kirsten Thorpe, an archivist and Chancellor’s Indigenous Research Fellow at the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research at the University of Technology Sydney. In her experience, part of Indigenous property reclamation is adding to and enhancing metadata so it reflects the community’s values and culture rather than the institution that first took it. That doesn’t mean simply replacing tags, keywords, or descriptions. “Erasure isn’t helpful in any shape or form because the context of how things were collected and created is also really vital,” Thorpe says. 

This adds a profoundly emotional component to the work, as community members who examine reclaimed artifacts and images can provide names, dates, and context that would otherwise not have been named. “That’s really powerful,” Thorpe says. “I do a bit of work around the idea of returning love to ancestors: so many collections, whether it was state or church influences, would document communities and never take time to record names. So, for future generations there’s a gap of being able to locate family and community. Mukurtu enables this process of returning that love so that people can actually say, ‘I know that person and this is their family name.’”  

This is a form of data sovereignty, says María Montenegro, assistant professor of global Indigenous studies at University of California Irvine and co-director and project manager of Mukurtu’s California Native Hub for training of its users. “Having that control and that power over their knowledge is for many tribes unprecedented,” she says, adding that now some “tribes are going beyond the cultural and moving into more legal political terrain.”  

They’re using maps, documents, photos, and other records that were stored forgotten in garages and boxes all over to build and support territorial claims and petitions for federal recognition. That, Montenegro says, “empowers tribes in a way that’s also really meaningful.”