This week’s reading, “Haiti’s Declaration of Independence: Digging for Lost Documents in the Archives of the Atlantic World” caught my attention because it presents a challenge that present day society faces: if it isn’t on the internet, it doesn’t exist. Though this was not directly the situation with the Haitian Declaration of Independence, it is called into question through the assumptions that were made about the source. Many people believe that everything they would ever need to know is on the Internet and represented accurately. However, this concept has been refuted on multiple occasions, the discovery of the original Haitian Declaration of Independence being one of them. Once this original document was found, it gave the survivors of Hurricane Katrina a sense of nationalism. This sense of a properly represented self and presence on the internet that the original document gave the Haitians reminded me of the Native Peace Project, created by Professor Srinivasan from the Information Studies department at UCLA, which he describes in his paper “Indigenous, Ethnic and Cultural Articulations of New Media”. This project focused on representing the history and traditions of the San Pasqual reservation. Professor Srinivasan worked directly with the San Pasqual people to discover ways that he could assist them in creating a website that could hold all of their histories and honor their traditions without being influenced by other aspects of modern society. He also worked to ensure that the community goals that they held were represented on this page. This project worked in an attempt to represent the peoples in their own way, rather than having outsiders attempt to represent them. The project reminded me of the Haitian documents in this aspect because the nations were able to gain a sense of national identity through the words of their own people, rather than the comments of others.
The project also mirrored the Haitian documents because it served as a means to connect people who have been displaced from their original home. In the case of the Native Peace Project, the Internet allowed a connection for all of the 19 related reservations that were displaced from their original location on the sea to ones that were better for agriculture and across borders. The website became a place to reflect shared aspects of memory and aspiration among all of these individual groups. Similarly, the discovery of the Haitian Declaration of Independence acted as a unifying factor for people of Haitian descent to positively connect with during a time of national hardship, and allowed their community to focus on the goals of their Declaration in the rebuilding of their home.