This panel will discuss the first stage of the “Urarina Digital Heritage Project,” a collaborative effort of the Public Anthropology Program, the Spencer Museum of Art, and the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Kansas, together with other scholars and the Indigenous Urarina community in the Peruvian Amazon. Fusing public anthropology with multilingual and community-driven digital humanities, this project supports the return, in public and digital format, of Urarina cultural heritage items through the use of Indigenous information management systems (the Mukurtu publishing platform) and cultural protocols (via Traditional Knowledge content licenses) to create a digital collection of Urarina cultural heritage in collaboration with the Urarina community.

Throughout the development process, the project team has explored issues related to Indigenous digital archives while working in the Global North with Global South indigenous community heritage. With the intention to spark further discussion about this type of work among scholars, librarians, and community members in Latin America, this roundtable opens a dialogue about transnational, collaborative efforts to address the imperial and colonial violence that has separated Indigenous cultural collections held in memory institutions from their original communities. Similarly, it questions the function and objectives of a digital project in a context characterized by difficult access to the internet or a telephone network. This presupposes a real limit for the communities and feeds a critical stance towards the real scope of digital resources. However, it is important to underline how this does not presuppose a rejection on the part of the communities involved, but represents a highly-valued opportunity to achieve greater visibility and facilitate communications between communities and beyond.

Presenter one will provide background about the Urarina community and about this particular collection of heritage items, and will discuss the vision and goals of the project.

Presenter two will describe and provide an assessment of the digital project in more detail, including the process and workflow, team member roles, tools and platforms and their effectiveness, the current status of the project, and next steps.

Presenter three will touch on the challenges this project faces related to the geographical and racial positionality of the initial team, and the efforts to solidify a digital project grounded in an ethical collaborative structure between scholars from the Global North and Indigenous community members in the Global South.

Lastly, presenter four will discuss the first efforts on how the translation of metadata into the Urarina language was carried out from a draft in Spanish and, most importantly, from the images that were used to work collectively on the translation of the object descriptions.This methodology allows us to reflect on the real possibilities of developing a hybrid model (digital and non-digital) that presupposes a shared work, according to a specific methodology, even in what could appear to be a simple translation of contents.

Thus, this roundtable examines transnational and decolonial approaches required when working with Indigenous heritage across US/Latin American borders and within the digital and public humanities at large.