Interlude C: Who Owns Sacred Memory?

This chapter is part of the book The Sacred Editors: Lost Texts.

The Ethics of Sacred Preservation

The elder's voice carried across the meeting hall in Auckland, steady and deliberate. "We are not trying to hide our stories," Māori leader Tāmati Reedy explained to the assembled librarians and digital archivists in 2003. "We are trying to keep them sacred."¹ The room fell silent. For months, controversy had swirled around the unauthorized digitization of traditional Māori narratives by well-meaning researchers who had placed oral stories online without community consent. What seemed like preservation to outsiders felt like violation to those whose ancestors had entrusted these stories to specific keepers under specific conditions.

This moment crystallized a fundamental tension in the digital age: preservation is no longer just a technical task but an ethical relationship. As sacred texts are scanned, stored, and shared with unprecedented speed and scale, new questions multiply. Who has the right to record a prayer? Who controls access to a digital manuscript? Who decides if a tradition is ready to be archived, or if it should remain private? These questions echo across traditions and continents, from Scandinavian Sámi yoiks to Australian Aboriginal songlines, from Central Asian Islamic manuscripts to African griot oral histories.²

Much of the modern preservation infrastructure—libraries, cloud servers, scholarly databases—rests on a default assumption that access is inherently good. The field of digital humanities has largely embraced what scholar Kimberly Christen calls "open access evangelism," the belief that democratizing information automatically serves justice.³ Yet for many communities, especially Indigenous and historically marginalized groups, sacred knowledge is not simply information. It is covenant, responsibility, inheritance. Sometimes, it is not for outsiders.

Digitization brings undeniable benefits. It saves fragile documents from fire, war, and decay. It enables diaspora communities to reconnect with their heritage. It allows collaborative scholarship and interfaith discovery. But it also risks exposure, erasure of context, and cultural harm when done without consent. The challenge lies not in choosing between preservation and protection, but in developing ethical frameworks that honor both.

The Māori Model: From Extraction to Partnership

The 2003 Auckland meeting marked a turning point in New Zealand's approach to cultural preservation. Several Māori oral narratives—previously shared only in ritual contexts—had been digitized and placed online by researchers who viewed public access as an obvious good. The community disagreed. Though the content was technically public, its sacred function and rhythm had been stripped away. Elder Merata Mita explained the concern: "When you take our stories from their proper place, you do not preserve them. You make them into something else entirely."⁴

Māori leaders demanded the removal of stories from public platforms and issued new guidelines emphasizing that recording is never neutral, and even translated text does not sever the tie to ancestral power. The result was not a rejection of preservation, but a call for preservation with partnership.

Today, New Zealand's libraries and universities often work under Māori-led ethical review boards that apply the principle of kaitiakitanga—guardianship that emphasizes stewardship over ownership.⁵ Digital collections include metadata about appropriate use, cultural context, and viewing restrictions. Some stories are still shared digitally, but with context, care, and consent. The National Library of New Zealand now employs Kairaranga (cultural advisors) who work alongside Māori communities to determine appropriate access levels for different materials.

This model has influenced similar initiatives worldwide. In Scandinavia, Sámi communities now use comparable protocols for preserving traditional yoiks (spiritual songs), ensuring that sacred songs remain within appropriate cultural boundaries even as they are recorded for community use.⁶

Hopi Ceremonies: Sacred Boundaries in Museum Spaces

The Hopi of the American Southwest have long maintained that certain songs and visual motifs—particularly from initiation ceremonies—must not be photographed, recorded, or replicated outside their proper ceremonial context. These restrictions reflect not secrecy but sacred responsibility: some knowledge requires preparation, community standing, and spiritual maturity to receive properly.

Yet throughout the twentieth century, anthropologists and museums routinely violated these boundaries. Ethnomusicologist Natalie Curtis recorded Hopi ceremonial songs in 1903 despite tribal objections.⁷ Museums exhibited kachina figures and displayed ceremonial artifacts in public spaces, treating sacred objects as aesthetic curiosities. When digital archives emerged, these violations multiplied exponentially.

In recent decades, Hopi scholars and elders have fought for what they call "cultural repatriation"—the return or restriction of sacred items, including removal from online databases.⁸ The Smithsonian Institution and other museums now partner with tribes to flag culturally sensitive materials and allow communities to restrict or curate access to digital collections. The Protocols for Native American Archival Materials, developed by tribal librarians and archivists, provide guidelines for respectful digitization that many institutions have adopted.⁹

Similar issues affect other Indigenous traditions. Australian Aboriginal communities have developed "cultural maps" that indicate which digital materials should be accessible to men, women, or initiated community members only. These systems preserve knowledge while maintaining cultural integrity.

Ethiopian Manuscripts: Repatriation and Interpretive Authority

During the nineteenth century, European expeditions to Ethiopia acquired hundreds of illuminated Christian manuscripts—some through legitimate gift or purchase, others through outright looting during conflicts like the 1868 British expedition to Magdala.¹⁰ Today, these texts reside in the British Library, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and other Western institutions, where they are studied primarily by European and American scholars.

Ethiopian monks and scholars have called for their repatriation—not only of the physical scrolls but of the authority to control their interpretation. Father Ephrem Carr, a specialist in Ethiopian liturgy, explains: "These manuscripts are not museum pieces. They are living texts that belong within our liturgical tradition, interpreted by those who live that tradition daily."¹¹

In some cases, scanned versions have been shared online without input from Ethiopian clerics, reducing sacred texts to aesthetic or academic objects. The Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at Saint John's University has pioneered a different approach, working directly with Ethiopian monasteries to create digital archives that remain under local control.¹² Monks determine access levels, provide interpretive context, and maintain authority over how their texts are presented to the world.

The core issue extends beyond access to encompass ownership of memory, liturgical control, and the integrity of sacred space. As archival studies scholar Michelle Caswell argues, "Who controls the narrative of the past controls the possibilities of the future."¹³

Digital Dead Sea Scrolls and Contested Ownership

The digitization of the Dead Sea Scrolls illustrates how even ancient texts raise contemporary ethical questions. When the Israel Antiquities Authority partnered with Google to create high-resolution digital images in 2011, the project was celebrated as a triumph of preservation and access.¹⁴ Yet Palestinian scholars protested that artifacts discovered in the occupied West Bank were being presented as exclusively Israeli heritage, with no acknowledgment of Palestinian claims or cultural connection to the region.

The controversy highlights how digital preservation can never be politically neutral. Metadata describing the scrolls' "discovery in Israel" embeds particular historical and political narratives, while excluding others. Similar tensions surround the digitization of Islamic manuscripts in Kashmir, Tibetan texts in China, and Kurdish oral traditions in Turkey—cases where cultural preservation intersects with political sovereignty and contested histories.

Toward Ethical Stewardship Frameworks

Across traditions, the call is consistent: sacred preservation must not replicate colonial logic. It must honor boundaries, build trust, and empower communities as custodians of their own memory. Emerging ethical models provide concrete alternatives to extractive approaches.

Community-centered digitization platforms like Mukurtu, developed by Indigenous archivists, allow for layered access and cultural protocols.¹⁵ Sacred content can be digitized but accessed only by members of the originating community, or made available at different levels based on cultural appropriateness. Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels, developed by Local Contexts, provide standardized ways for communities to indicate cultural protocols and appropriate use for their materials.¹⁶

Conditional consent models enable preservation while respecting restrictions. The Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University works with Native American communities to preserve songs that remain accessible only to tribal members, creating what archivist Suzanne Mudge calls "culturally responsive access."¹⁷ Similar approaches protect sacred Islamic texts in collections at the University of Michigan and preserve sensitive Jewish materials at the YIVO Institute.

Metadata can function as respect, not just description. Including information about liturgical use, cultural context, and community voices prevents the flattening that occurs when sacred texts become mere historical artifacts. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative now includes fields for cultural protocols and community-specified access restrictions.¹⁸

Shared custodianship models treat communities as partners, not subjects. The Hill Museum and Manuscript Library's work with Eastern Christian monasteries exemplifies this approach—digitizing manuscripts in partnership with religious communities who retain interpretive authority and access control.¹⁹ The Digital Library Federation has developed guidelines for such collaborations that prioritize community agency and cultural autonomy.

Questions for Ethical Practice

Communities and institutions considering sacred text preservation might ask: Does this project serve the originating community's stated needs and priorities? Have appropriate community authorities given informed consent? Who will control access, interpretation, and future use? How will cultural protocols be maintained in digital spaces? What happens if community priorities change over time?

Individual researchers and readers can also practice ethical engagement by respecting community-established protocols, seeking permission before sharing sacred materials, and recognizing that some knowledge may not be appropriate for their access level or cultural position.

Memory as Covenant

Sacred preservation is not about saving files but about honoring the covenant between people and text, earth and story, voice and silence. In many traditions, memory itself is sacred—not just what is remembered, but how, when, and by whom. The Qur'anic tradition emphasizes that revelation must be received with proper spiritual preparation. Jewish tradition maintains distinctions between publicly accessible Torah study and esoteric knowledge restricted to qualified scholars. Hindu traditions recognize that certain mantras require initiation and proper context to transmit safely.

Digital technologies can serve these principles or violate them, depending on how they are designed and deployed. The future of sacred memory will be shaped not only by what we can preserve but by how we choose to preserve it, and whose voices we center in that sacred work.

As archival theorist Verne Harris observes, "The archive is never innocent. Every act of preservation is simultaneously an act of power."²⁰ Recognizing this truth opens possibilities for preservation that serves justice, honors tradition, and builds bridges between communities while respecting the sacred boundaries that give spiritual knowledge its power and meaning.

Notes and Further Reading

Tāmati Reedy, quoted in Joanna Kidman, "Māori Cultural Rights and Digital Preservation," New Zealand Journal of History 38, no. 2 (2004): 185-199.
Kimberly Christen, "Does Information Really Want to Be Free? Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness," International Journal of Communication 6 (2012): 2870-2893.
Christen, "Does Information Really Want to Be Free?," 2871.
Merata Mita, quoted in Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2012), 176.
Aroha Harris, "Concurrent Narratives of Māori and Integration in the 1960s," Journal of New Zealand Studies 6/7 (2007/2008): 139-155.
Veli-Pekka Lehtola, "Sámi Histories, Colonialism, and Finland," Arctic Anthropology 52, no. 2 (2015): 22-36.
Natalie Curtis, The Indians' Book (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1907), recording protocols criticized in Peter Whiteley, "Hopitutungwni: 'Hopi Names' as Literature," in Naming, Identity, and Performance in Hopi Literature, ed. Ekkehart Malotki (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993), 15-81.
T.J. Ferguson, "Native Americans and the Practice of Archaeology," Annual Review of Anthropology 25 (1996): 63-79.
Protocols for Native American Archival Materials (2006), available at https://www2.nau.edu/libnap-p/protocols.html
Richard Pankhurst, "The Library of Emperor Tewodros II at Maqdala (Magdala)," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 36, no. 1 (1973): 15-42.
Ephrem Carr, quoted in Getatchew Haile, "Ethiopian Manuscript Collections: Past, Present, and Future," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 78, no. 3 (1996): 13-28.
Columba Stewart, "Preservation and Access: The Patrimony of Eastern Christianity," Theological Studies 67, no. 3 (2006): 634-647.
Michelle Caswell, Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (New York: Routledge, 2021), 27.
Ariel David, "Google Puts Dead Sea Scrolls Online," National Geographic, September 26, 2011.
Kimberly Christen, "Opening Archives: Respectful Repatriation," American Archivist 74, no. 1 (2011): 185-210.
Jane Anderson and Kimberly Christen, "Chuck a Copyright on It: Dilemmas of Digital Return and the Possibilities for Traditional Knowledge Licenses and Labels," Museum Anthropology Review 7, no. 1-2 (2013): 105-126.
Suzanne Mudge, "Culturally Responsive Access: Rethinking Indigenous Materials in Academic Archives," Archival Issues 32, no. 2 (2008): 102-118.
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, "Cultural Context Vocabularies" (2019), available at https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/
Stewart, "Preservation and Access," 640-645.
Verne Harris, "The Archive, Public History and the Essential Truth," in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton et al. (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), 169.