As I Remember It has been selected as a finalist in the Multimodal category for the American Council of Learned Society (ACLS) and Arcadia Open Access Publishing Award. Read the interview with Davis McKenzie, whose traditional Tla’min name is aʔǰɛmaθot, as he discusses the motivations and impact of working with his grandmother to publish her life story and teachings.

What made you interested in this subject?

In today’s digital world we as ɬaʔamɩn people grapple with issues of how to effectively and appropriately harness the value of the Internet for promoting and amplifying our respective teachings. We are aware of the risks: the ways that it can replicate and amplify the colonial paradigms that distort Indigenous knowledge; the toxic anonymity, digital scraping by AI, cutting and pasting, copyright infringement, commodification, surveillance, meme-ification. Those practices of many online cultures can, and often do, make the Internet an unsafe place for Indigenous knowledge and teachings.

But the Internet is also one place where Tla’amin amɩn people now live: more than half of our ɬaʔamɩn people live outside ɬaʔamɩn territory, and most are in cities. We also have a very youthful population, with over half of our people under the age of twenty-five. Digital spaces hold the potential to keep us connected to the territory, the teachings, and each other across physical distances and generations.

I was blessed to be born into my Chi Chia’s world, to have a grandparent raised in her language and culture and for the most part escaping the horrors of Indian Residential School. [Chi Chia is Elsie Paul, Davis’s grandmother.] Her teachings are key to the very survival of Tla’amin way of life and serve as a powerful counter-narrative to what we learn in schools and society about ourselves and our identity.

While a website can never fully replicate face-to-face, human interaction, the goal of this digital book is not to offer up an online Elder to replace the familial and ceremonial interactions where teachings are given, received, transmitted. It is, instead, an acknowledgment that new tools exist that can support our existence and healing as a people. And at this point in our history, we can use all the tools we can get. We need to take risks and do our best.

Why and how did you pursue open access publication for this book?

It was critical to make my Chi Chia’s teachings available to all Tla’amin people who wanted them, no matter where they lived, free of charge. This was a non-negotiable with my now 92-year-old grandmother. Throughout her life she has offered her life story generously, free of charge (it is considered bad form in our world to be paid for your words, especially when they have a healing and teaching intention). Open source meant that the schools could access this publication too. UBC Press and RavenSpace made this possible for us.

Pragmatically, we needed and wanted a permanent home for this publication. We hoped for and received the heft of an institution (University of British Columbia), which added another layer of power and recognition to Chi Chia’s teachings and life story.

Did anything surprise you in your experience as an open access author?

This is my first ever book of any sort. The experience of producing this open-access book was revelatory. UBC Press, Raven Space, and several creative partners together formed this sort of agency setting, each bringing their best.

Any words of advice to other scholars who are considering open access publication?

Just do it. The internet has democratized communication and erased many of the traditional barriers to speaking directly to your community and other audiences. Open access has made a way to hear unexpected voices and versions of history that have been silent too long. Already tens of thousands of people have read our humble book. My Chi Chia is blown away by this interest and reception to her words, her teachings from our corner of the world.

This interview first appeared on the ACLS website.