Our Memories, Our Future: Protecting Our Memories to Power Movements for Liberation

​Who holds our community's memories? Who decides what gets remembered, and what disappears?

​Facilitated by Primary Source Archive (PSA) in partnership with Philadelphia Folklore Project (PFP) and Finding Ceremony, this learning and collaborative workshop invites AAPI community members, allies, and anyone curious about archives and memory preservation to build shared understanding around what community memory is, why it matters, and what's at stake when community doesn’t own, control, or steward it.

​We’ll hear from Finding Ceremony, a descendant community-controlled reparationist process restoring the lineages of care, reverence, and spiritual memory to the work of caring for our dead. Their work illuminates what becomes possible when we organize for the return of captive remains of ancestors, from colonial institutions to descendant communities.

​We'll then engage in collective visioning to answer: what does it look like to protect our memories in ways that serve our movements, now and into the future? Participants will contribute to a governance and consent framework to develop systems, tools, and practices that protect community memory.

​This workshop is being facilitated in conversation with the No Arena: Making a Movement exhibition. If you haven't yet visited, we invite you to arrive 20 minutes early to spend time with the work before we gather.