Archives, Kinship, Citizenship

In 2019, archivist and scholar Jarrett Martin Drake delivered a keynote that reframed how we understand archives. His thesis: archives are not neutral repositories but active arbiters of belonging—”institutions that decide who counts as family and who qualifies as citizen.

Drake’s argument emerged from years working in both archives and prisons, two sites he came to see as mirror opposites. As he explains, “Whereas archives instantiate and help to facilitate kinship and citizenship ties, the prison exists to ensure their erasure.” Archives represent one pole in “processes of belonging and un-belonging”—”establishing who is and isn’t legitimate before the state. (Drake 2019)

Kinship

Drake identifies American archival practice’s “family fetish,” an obsession with genealogical documentation that shaped the field from its inception. Early U.S. archives weren’t national projects but private historical societies collecting family papers of wealthy merchants, enslavers, and politicians. When public archives emerged in the post-Reconstruction South, they served a specific purpose: documenting white Southerners’ lineage to Confederate soldiers for monument dedications, pension claims, and membership in organizations like the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

This genealogical emphasis persists today. Drake notes that despite archivists’ preferred self-image, “the most consistent and persistent user base of archival repositories have been genealogists.” This holds true whether the archive is a public government agency or a university library division.

This system made archives the gatekeepers of kinship. Technological standards like EAC-CPF (Encoded Archival Context) still inscribe family as a natural, stable entity. ¹ But as Drake argues, “this assumption barely holds up for white people, and it certainly does not hold up for the black, indigenous, and Latinx peoples who have had to forge and re-forge familial ties in particular forms as a way to cope with white supremacy, cisgender heteronormativity, forced migration, mass criminalization, and invading armies.”

The claimed neutrality of archives masks this gatekeeping function. As historian Howard Zinn argued in a then-controversial 1970 speech to archivists, “the archivist, even more than the historian and the political scientist, tends to be scrupulous about his neutrality, and to see his job as a technical job, free from the nasty world of political interest.” But Zinn insisted that “the archivist, in subtle ways, tends to perpetuate the political and economic status quo simply by going about his ordinary business. His supposed neutrality is, in other words, a fake.” (Zinn n.d.)

Cherokee people are among the best-documented populations in America—”thirty rolls created between 1817 and 1914, meticulous census records, extensive tribal documentation. This bureaucracy facilitated removal; the Trail of Tears required paperwork. Yet white Southerners routinely claimed Cherokee ancestry based solely on family lore, absent any documentary evidence. These claims began in the 1840s-50s as a way to legitimate their “native-born status as sons or daughters of the South”—”using Indigenous kinship to assert authentic white regional identity, even as actual Indigenous people were being removed. By the post-Reconstruction era, such claims often functioned as dogwhistle signifiers of Lost Cause Confederate allegiance.

But the archive’s racial violence cut deepest within Cherokee families themselves. The Dawes Commission, tasked with creating final citizenship rolls from 1898-1906, established three distinct classifications: “Cherokee by Blood,” “Intermarried White,” and “Freedmen.” This imposed racial categories that hadn’t previously structured Cherokee kinship, splitting families across bureaucratic lines. The Shoe Boots family exemplifies this rupture. Shoe Boots, a Cherokee warrior, and Doll, an enslaved African woman, lived together for thirty years, walked the Trail of Tears together, and raised children who spoke Cherokee and participated fully in tribal life. Yet the Dawes Rolls separated them—”some family members listed “by blood,” others as “Freedmen”—”turning relatives into different legal categories. Over 1,400 Cherokee Freedmen applicants were rejected for citizenship despite bringing witnesses who testified to their Cherokee language fluency, cultural participation, and kinship ties. The archive demanded “blood” where lived kinship existed.

Zinn identified this structural pattern: “the collection of records, papers, and memoirs, as well as oral history, is biased towards the important and powerful people of the society, tending to ignore the impotent and obscure: we learn most about the rich, not the poor; the successful, not the failures… white, not Black; free people rather than prisoners.” The question becomes stark: whose family stories require documentation, and whose are accepted on faith?

Citizenship

Archives also cultivate citizenship. They keep constitutions, laws, and governmental records that theoretically allow citizens to contest grievances and hold the state accountable. As Drake explains, “It is within the archive that the subject becomes a citizen, fully aware of the benefits guaranteed in the legal system(s) designed for her enjoyment.” Yet as Zinn observed, “the existence, preservation, and availability of archives, documents, records in our society are very much determined by the distribution of wealth and power. That is, the most powerful, the richest elements in society have the greatest capacity to find documents, preserve them, and decide what is or is not available to the public.” The accessibility of archives is presented as fundamental to democracy—”but access itself is structured by existing hierarchies of power.

The Cherokee Freedmen case demonstrates how archival power operates through structural design, not just document preservation. The 1866 treaty explicitly granted freed slaves “all the rights of native Cherokees”—”the document existed, preserved in the archive. Yet the Dawes Rolls, established as the authoritative citizenship archive, structured exclusion through racial classifications that contradicted the treaty. Blood quantum requirements and “Cherokee by Blood” designations became the operational archive—”the mechanism that determined who could actually claim citizenship. The archive preserved the treaty while simultaneously constructing an apparatus that denied it. Which document counted as authoritative? The archive chose. In selecting the Dawes Rolls over the treaty as the basis for citizenship, archives functioned exactly as Drake and Zinn describe: legitimating power’s preferred version of belonging while technically preserving evidence of different promises.

Southern archives preserved Confederate family papers while documenting Indigenous families primarily for removal. The same institutions that claim to uphold democratic citizenship actively shaped who could claim belonging. The archive didn’t passively record kinship claims—”it actively legitimated some while erasing others.

Prisons

If archives instantiate kinship and citizenship, prisons systematically destroy them. Drake details how prisons sever family bonds through expensive phone calls, remote locations, and dehumanizing visitation policies. They strip citizenship by removing voting rights and access to the government records that archives preserve. Forced sterilizations of incarcerated women prevented future kinship ties altogether. As Drake explains, prisons render people as “non-family and non-citizens. By stripping incarcerated people of fundamental human and democratic rights, prisons strive to make non-humans out of humans and non-citizens out of citizens.” He describes prisons as “graveyards of exclusion”—”the ultimate sites of un-belonging. But archives can function similarly when they memorialize certain families while disappearing others, validating some claims to belonging while denying the rest.

Toward Rebel Archives

Drake calls for “rebel archives” that resist rather than reinforce exclusion. The Shoe Boots family created their own. As scholar Eve Eure argues, the citizenship applications and land deeds they submitted to the Cherokee Nation constitute “intergenerational testimonials”—”documents that transmit histories of unfinished familial claims and refuse racial conceptions of belonging. Each application wasn’t merely an individual claim but a collective utterance embedding the desires of family members “whether living, lost, or dead.” Across generations, they produced their own print record, insisting on kinship and citizenship that official archives denied.

Zinn anticipated this call fifty years earlier, arguing that if “the normal functioning of the scholar, the intellectual, the researcher, helps maintain those corrupt norms” in society, “then what we always asked of scholars in those terrible places is required of us in the United States today: rebellion against the norm.” The archive has always decided who belongs. Drake’s challenge is direct: “If archivists care as much about families and citizenship as much as their websites, publications, and projects profess, then they would begin to see the prison as the ultimate rupture of those notions and envision their work as seminal in contesting these graveyards of exclusion.” As he insists, “Nobody belongs in prison,” and the work of creating archives that affirm rather than deny belonging requires “an insurgent intentionality and an orientation to the work that, if practiced, brings us all to a more approximate version of freedom. That is the labor, and if we do it right, that is also the liberation.”

1. Drake, Jarrett M. 2019. “‘Graveyards of Exclusion:’ Archives, Prisons, and the Bounds of Belonging.” Sustainable Futures.
2. Zinn, Howard. n.d. “Secrecy, Archives, and the Public Interest.” Howard Zinn. Accessed October 23, 2025.