Memory: More Than Recall 133that includes differences in power, histories, and identities. The memories
held by a member of an indigenous community in the Americas exist in the
tension between dominant social narratives (often framed as a singular
history) and the cultural understandings of temporalities, ancestors, and
memory as an ethical obligation to the community (Deloria, 2009).
Memory in context removes foundational Western epistemologies of
universality and ahistoricity. Indigenous peoples’ model(s) of memory and
histories should exist without a reductive comparison that filters their
knowledge back through the universal three-phase model. By removing
context, the risk of reproducing the erasure of histories and cultures that
was practiced during colonization is much higher. Memory in context
ensures a much more inclusive approach for gathering the relevant data
held in memory and for understanding how memory is made and works.
INTERWOVEN SITES OF MEMORY: INDIVIDUAL,
COLLECTIVE, HISTORICAL, AND CONTESTED
Individual Memory
Paul Connerton (1989) looks at individual memory through personal,
cognitive, and habit memory. Personal memory is our life narrative, how
we remember our personal past. Cognitive memory is how we remember
how to conjugate a verb or solve a geometry equation. We do not have to
remember the context of how we learned conjugation to be able to
conjugate, whereas with personal memory we need context to understand
and even re-interpret the events of our past.
Habit memory is the embodied memory we form for tasks like riding a
bicycle or how to thread a needle. Habit memory can also require context,
for example, remembering how to respond to a greeting will differ in most
cultures depending on whom you are greeting.