Local Contexts
Emily Santhanam is an accomplished outreach professional and curator with extensive experience in cultural institutions and Indigenous advocacy. Currently serving as Outreach Manager at Local Contexts, Emily leads outreach initiatives aimed at engaging key communities and stakeholders to advance the organization's mission of supporting Indigenous cultural authority. Previously, Emily held roles as Associate Curator and Curatorial Assistant at the Harwood Museum of Art, contributing to exhibitions and educational programs. Additional experiences include curatorial and research positions at the School for Advanced Research, IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, and the Chickasaw Cultural Center, as well as internships that focused on cultural preservation and archaeology. Emily holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University.
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Local Contexts
Every Indigenous community has cultural and biological collections and data within national archives, libraries, museums and other public and private repositories that they do not own, do not control, and cannot govern circulation over. Significant information about these collections, including individual and community names and proper provenance information is absent. Issues of responsibility, ownership, as well as the incomplete and/or significant mistakes in the metadata extend to every other knowledge asset or digital record building upon this information. The Local Contexts project was developed in 2010 and grew from the needs of Indigenous and local organizations who wanted a practical method to deal with the range of intellectual cultural property issues that arise in relation to managing cultural heritage materials, Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous data. Local Contexts offers a robust system of digital labelling to intervene in the structural and ongoing colonial digital legacy of Indigenous erasure. The Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Biocultural (BC) Labels and Notices work to enhance and legitimize locally based decision-making and Indigenous governance frameworks for determining ownership, access, and culturally appropriate conditions for sharing historical, contemporary, and future collections of cultural heritage and Indigenous data.