A way to hold the past in your hand

KATHLEEN BYRD ON FEBRUARY 1, 2021

Don’t sell the Sand Point Archives

The National Archives at Seattle holds 56,000 cubic feet (1 million boxes) of permanent records, including documents and artifacts from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Alaska.  Access to these documents and artifacts is particularly important to genealogists, historians, writers, and others who seek a more intimate understanding of and connection with our region’s past.

The Archive at Seattle holds treaty records for 272 federally recognized Native American Tribes and other unrecognized groups, Chinese Exclusion Act Records, and Japanese Internment Records. These records and documents contain intimate and tangible details of our region’s history, details that bring to life stories of our past that matter to the present and to our future.

For example, information contained at the Seattle National Archive was critically important for federal recognition of the Klamath Tribes in 1986. Few of the documents are digitized, so physical access is critical for local historians, writers, genealogists, and tribal members to access the material.

For many, being in the physical presence of documents and artifacts is an important part of the research process. There’s an emotional charge in finding a handwritten document, a photograph, or a record that offers insight into the past you are attempting to assemble, a past that suddenly surges into the present moment. It’s as if the document or material item possesses the energy of the original moment — it’s an experience of the past collapsing into the present, and the present meeting the past, an immediate sensation of connection.

The National Archives in Seattle, is currently closed due to Covid, and this means a temporary loss of touch and intimacy for those seeking knowledge from the past.  But the threat of permanent loss looms with the plan to sell the Seattle Archives Property and move all of the records.

Moving these regional documents to far away parts of the country is beyond an inconvenience; it is a form of displacement; a way of detaching and distancing something that forms a part of this place.  This is underscored by the list of tribes who are parties to AG Ferguson’s 2021 lawsuit to prevent the sale and closure of the Seattle facility. To honor the treaties, to understand the depth and richness of our shared past, we need to honor these tribal members’ access to the treaties and other historical records that belong to them.