Current procedures of Federal Recognition—the “legal acknowledgement” of the sovereign and separate political status of tribal nations by the US government—require tribes to document their history, race, culture, and genealogy, and to submit the evidence for review to the Office of Federal Acknowledgement (OFA), where federal agents sit in critical judgment of the petitioning groups’ identity and tribal status. However, many of the types of evidence required and accepted by the OFA as legitimate and official have been destroyed, or removed, or appropriated from these groups; are held, undisclosed, by the very federal agencies that require their production; or were created by non-Indians or the state itself with a clear intent of Indigenous dispossession. This paper argues that evidence, as currently conceived, used, and legitimated by the OFA, perpetuates settler colonial anxieties and practices of exclusion, racism, appropriation and erasure. Rooted in colonial and legal conceptions of evidence, the Federal Recognition policy fails to consider the contexts, temporalities, histories, and cultures of the petitioning tribes. Applying ethnography of the archive/document ethnography, the paper first examines the role(s) that colonial archives play structurally in the Federal Recognition process, particularly in supporting the ways in which settler colonial thinking permeates and predetermines those processes. Secondly, it investigates ways in which archivists could assist tribes in navigating this convoluted and biased process by formulating and legitimizing anticolonial conceptions of evidence that take into account tribal contexts and practices of creation. Finally, it considers how this conceptual, epistemological and practical shift can lead to a more unified effort to decolonize archival praxis within tribal sovereignty claims and purposes.

中文翻译：

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令人不安的证据：反殖民档案方法/对联邦承认的谴责

当前的联邦承认程序（即美国政府对部落国家的主权和独立政治地位的“法律承认”）要求部落记录其历史，种族，文化和家谱，并将证据提交给办公室联邦致谢书（OFA），其中联邦特工对请愿组的身份和部落地位进行严格的判断。但是，OFA要求并接受为合法和官方的许多类型的证据已被破坏，移走或从这些组织中挪用；由需要生产的联邦机构持有，但未公开；或由非印第安人或州本身创建，并有明确的土著人剥夺意图。本文认为，目前由OFA构思，使用和验证的证据，使定居者的殖民焦虑长期存在，并导致排斥，种族主义，侵占和消除。根植于殖民和法律上的证据概念，联邦承认政策未能考虑上访部落的背景，时间，历史和文化。运用档案志/文档民族志的民族志，本文首先考察了殖民档案在联邦承认过程中的结构性作用，特别是在支持定居者殖民思想渗透并预先确定这些过程的方式方面。其次，它研究了档案工作者如何通过制定和合法化考虑殖民地背景和创造实践的反殖民证据概念，来协助部落渡过这个复杂而有偏见的过程。最后，