come back, history calls, to the solid ground of fact. you don’t want to fall off the edge of the world –

— Daphne Marlatt, Ana Historic

Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic explores the silences and stories found through an unconventional reading of a record in Vancouver’s city archives.[1] In so doing, she shows how documents found in archives, sometimes treated as unproblematic representations of a recoverable past, may appear in another light as deliberately preserved, power-suffused creations of privileged authors of that past. With this issue in mind, I undertook a methodological exercise examining the circumstances of creation, collection and uses of an archival source, as a reflection on the status of what Greg Dening calls historical "relics." Dening makes several assertions about "sign-bearing relics of the past," and the problems of analysis and interpretation they present.[2] Using his ideas and a selection of readings on archival and appraisal theory, I developed a set of questions with which to interrogate a previously "familiar" archival record, the Roderick Haig-Brown Papers in the University of British Columbia Library Special Collections Division. In the past, I used Haig-Brown’s papers in my master’s thesis research, for some contract research and in the preparation of a forthcoming paper on Haig-Brown. After considering these questions, I will reflection on how this exercise has affected my perception of this source.

Dening’s discussion of "relics of the past" touches on their primary status as "cultural artifacts of the moments that produce them... ."[3] A collection is a discrete thing itself, apart from its content, that has a context of cultural meaning and history. Some archival theorists, in debates about the acquisition and appraisal of records and documents, appeal to the context of creation as the source of an item’s value. Luciana Duranti, arguing for a non-interventionist archival practice, posits culture as the "contextual interaction of meaning with action." Thus, archives should represent "the natural interrelationship of [culture’s] documentary residue," not an artificially solicited, putatively "complete" documentary record.[4] The collection’s contexts are not only cultural, of course, but archival. "Just as all documents of the same fonds are equally functional to the existence of that specific fonds, all fonds are equally functional to the existence of our documentary heritage," Duranti writes. "This also implies that each document within a fonds, and each fonds within a documentary universe, acquires its meaning from its relationship to the rest, that is from its context."[5] But Dening also reminds us that archival context is not merely a relationship to the greater collection, or an issue of collections mandate and procedure: "archives and museums are mirrors of power and cosmologies."[6]

While archival relics are produced in a cultural context, Dening further argues they "also become cultural artifacts of all the moments that give them permanence." We have seen how, for archivists, the "permanence" granted an artifact relates strongly to the cultural context in which it was created and of which it is a trace. However, archivist Hugh Taylor also argues that the "very act and deed" of collection may be subject to a "social historiography" of how and why records were preserved. Though archival theorist Terry Cook invokes Taylor, he persists advancing a model of collection practices that fails to account for the situatedness of the archivist.[7] By contrast, Roy Schaeffer posits a more nuanced understanding of the archival collection practices as conditioned by the "cultural interests of a definite moment or milieu."[8] In other words, the people and practices granting an object permanence are key to understanding its status as a historical relic.

Permanence, for Luciana Duranti, is an elusive and ultimately misguided value in archival theory, since it is impossible to predict the future value of objects for society.[9] Similarly, Dening suggests that "the relics of the past in their messages are transformed simply by being read" and that "they are reconstituted in their meanings by all the cultural systems that give them meaning."[10] This contrasts with historian Pierre Nora’s fear that "the indiscriminate production of archives is ... the clearest expression of the terrorism of historicized memory." [11] Nora argues that living memory is imprisoned by history, through objects in museums, archives and public memorials. However, Dening and Duranti move towards an understanding of the object itself as a living, shifting site of meaning that evolves each time it is accessed.

The foregoing insights guided me through a consideration of the Haig-Brown papers in their cultural and archival contexts, the moments of their permanence, and the interplay between their history, use and meaning. A thorough examination of the cultural moment in which to situate the production of Roderick Haig-Brown papers would be difficult, but must include the socio-economic context of British Columbia from the early 1930s to the early 1970s. It inevitably encompasses Haig-Brown’s experience as a well-educated British immigrant and settler in the then-remote Campbell River district. The papers were byproducts of Haig-Brown’s literary, conservation and personal activities, and found in a vast, if idiosyncratic, filing system including letters, notes, handwritten and typed manuscripts. As a writer, Haig-Brown must have understood this detritus as raw material for his own posterity. "Most must certainly be usellss (sic) junk," he wrote, perhaps disingenuously, in 1969, "though I suppose a student ploughing through it 50 or a hundred years from now ... might dig out some contemporary insights."[12]

A university policy for the acquisition of manuscript collections created the archival context for the Haig-Brown Collection was created by. Haig-Brown’s papers intersected with three elements of this mandate: "Preference should be given to materials indigenous to the region in which the University is situated," the policy noted, including "the papers of pioneers in any field vital to the life and growth of the province; the records of immigrants to the region recording their experiences as settlers" and "the literary papers of B.C. writers."[13] The directive to collect "Canadiana" formed the initial interest in Haig-Brown book manuscripts,[14] and his personal papers were regarded as worthy of collection as "literary remains."[15]

An investigation of the connections between the author and the institution links the archival context and process of "granting permanence" to these papers. Haig-Brown received an honorary doctorate from U.B.C. in 1952 and enjoyed long-time friendships with many powerful members of its staff and faculty through the Harry Hawthorne Foundation. The activities of this mock-cabalistic fishing club—including president N.A.M. MacKenzie and university librarian Neal Harlow and Haig-Brown—included donating to the university an extensive collection of fly-fishing literature.[16] In 1971, Haig-Brown personally donated $1,500 to the "Order of Library Friends," a group created by Harlow as "a distinctive class, appreciative of the importance of books" that helped him develop the Special Collections Division in the 1950s.[17] The collection of Haig-Brown’s papers at U.B.C., then, occurred within a web of relationships with those very gatekeepers who chose what to collect and where to house it.

The establishment of their "permanence" was no straightforward matter, however. In a 1966 letter, Haig-Brown wrote university librarian Basil Stuart-Stubbs that he had been approached by Syracuse University in New York regarding the donation of his manuscripts and papers. Haig-Brown noted that he believed the manuscripts and papers then held at U.B.C. were "on loan" but that "I can see no reason why they should not be a permanent gift."[18] Thereafter, though he continued to donate "installments" of papers, their status remained in question; prompted by word that Haig-Brown was preparing a new will, Anne Yandle of the Special Collections Division wrote Stuart-Stubbs in 1974 that no record of an agreement existed.[19] This led to the creation of an official Deed of Gift in April 1974. Thus, an element of fortuitousness, outside interest and a certain initiative on Haig-Brown’s part all led to the permanent inclusion of the entire Haig-Brown collection, not just manuscripts, at U.B.C. Once this "permanence" was established, the Haig-Brown papers began collecting the trappings of official archival status. An inventory was started and, with the receipt of a large amount of materials after Haig-Brown’s death, the university began to consider appraisal of the items. This formal process was undertaken by a National Archives Appraisal Board in 1981. In addition, application was made for the certification of the papers as "cultural property" for income tax purposes, which outlined the collection’s "outstanding significance and national importance."[20]

The Haig-Brown file contains an impressionistic record of inquiries, requests for access and research queries. The work of two biographers and one bibliographer appears through the letters and notes of the manuscript curator. After Ann Haig-Brown’s death, the Haig-Browns’ eldest daughter Valerie appears as her father’s literary executor, dealing with the republication of some materials and acting as gatekeeper to her father’s legacy. There is evidence, too, of the controversy surrounding E. Bennett Metcalfe’s biography, which contained salacious details about Haig-Brown’s private life.[21] Finally, almost unsettlingly, I found myself, as the reference for a research request earlier this year by an Oregon fly-fishing group interested in Haig-Brown’s activities in their area.[22] Is each of these readings, even when not explicitly citationary, shaped or influenced by earlier ones? Or does my individual reading of the Haig-Brown papers in some way constitute them anew, as an object qualitatively different than the one read at some other time by some other person for some other purpose? Dening, I think, would incline to the latter view, although my reading of the Haig-Brown papers did encompass at least the finished product of the earlier researchers’ efforts in the archives. Certainly, my reading was different in purpose and context from my forerunners and in that sense, the papers were being read for the first time, my way. By looking "backstage" through the Haig-Brown File at the research history of the papers, I was made more fully aware that every reading takes place in a particular context, that "the past is as much created as preserved by readings which must invent the circumstances that give meaning to words."[23]

In reexamining the Haig-Brown papers as a "relic of the past," I have come to see them in important new ways. The papers are more than their contents: they are the product of a cultural and archival context, which include the relationships and circumstances surrounding their coming to reside at U.B.C. I found that the justifications their permanent conservation varied over time and circumstance. Early on, his literary achievements, outside interest and, perhaps, Haig-Brown’s ties to U.B.C. through the Hawthorn Foundation pushed forward the collection’s enshrinement. Interestingly, by the time of the formal appraisal in the early 1980s, documentation of Haig-Brown’s role and activities as a conservationist, rather than simply literary merit, became part of the justification for preservation. Indeed, contemporary relevance and the use values of researchers in some ways continually reconstitute the meaning of the documents themselves. Finally, I found the trace records of users, including myself, posed a series of questions about the re-readings of the papers, which made me more aware of the partiality and situatedness of my particular experience with the collection. Self-awareness and reflexive research of this kind may help scholars escape the "terrorism" of the fetishised historical object and help situate both researcher and researched in their full contexts, enriching and opening the resulting interpretations.

[2] Greg Dening, “A Poetic for Histories,” in Performances (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996): 43.

[4] Luciana Duranti, “The Concept of Appraisal and Archival Theory” in American Archivist 57: Spring 1994, 328-344.

[6] Dening, 43.

[8] Roy C. Shaeffer, “Transcendent Concepts: Power, Appraisal and the Archivist as ‘Social Outcast,’” American Archivist 55 (Fall 1992): 619.

[10] Dening, 42.

[12] Roderick Haig-Brown to Basil Stuart-Stubbs, University of British Columbia Librarian, letter, August 13, 1969. File 1 of 2 of information relating to the Roderick Haig-Brown Papers, University of British Columbia Library, Special Collections Division. Hereafter, I will refer to these as “Haig-Brown File” and the number. I am very grateful for the access and assistance provided by George Brandak, Manuscript Curator of Special Collections.

[14] William K. Lamb, University Librarian, to Roderick Haig-Brown, letter, July 18, 1947, Haig-Brown File 1.

[16] This points to an relation within the larger archives with the Harry Hawthorne Foundation fonds, 1953-1986, University of British Columbia Library, Special Collections Division.

[18] Roderick Haig-Brown to Basil Stuart-Stubbs, letter, January 26, 1966, Haig-Brown File 1.

[20] Government of Canada, Secretary of State, “Application for Certification of Cultural Property for Income Tax Purposes,” completed February 26, 1981 by Anne Yandle, Special Collections Division, U.B.C. Library, Haig-Brown File 1.

[22] These letters are found in Haig-Brown File 2.

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