• Hawaiʻi and Samoa Scholars and Communities Against NARA San Francisco closure

    In the form below, please enter your name, email, and institutional affiliation to add your support our letter, the text of which appears below.

  • Who can sign: anyone connected to or in solidarity with Hawaiʻi and Samoa

    We started our letter as one focused on Hawaiʻi scholars but then broadened it when we heard from Samoan colleagues that this was a key archive for them as well. We also explored expanding the scope to include Guam and other parts of Micronesia that have been touched by US federal power. Though there are mentions in (1994) finding aids of records related to Guam and Micronesia, in talking to our colleagues from those regions, we heard that much more of their materials are held in the College Park, Maryland facility. To highlight the communities that would be most impacted by the closure, and to move relatively quickly, we decided to focus on Hawaiʻi and Samoa. We remain willing to further expand the letter if our colleagues from Guam and Micronesia want - please just get in touch. Similarly, our letter focuses on Hawaiʻi and Samoa without mentioning the other communities whose histories are heavily represented in these materials: including Japanese Americans and Native Americans. This is largely because there are other letters already circulating from those communities and we wanted ours to fill the gap specifically for Hawaiians and Samoans. Nonetheless, we are in contact with and, of course, in solidarity with those other efforts.

  • What's happened so far

    We emailed our letter to previous acting Archivist of the United States Edward Forst with our letter and all signatories on Thursday, August 13th. We received no response. We noticed there was a new Archivist of the United States, Bradford Wilson, and re-sent our letter with all signatories on Thursday, August 27th. As of August 30, we have received no response. We welcome folks continuing to sign as we are now turning toward reaching out to media. We have created a website to contain further updates here: https://savenarasf.my.canva.site/

  • Dr. Bradford Wilson

    Archivist of the United States

    National Archives and Records Administration

    8601 Adelphi Road

    College Park, MD 20740-6001


    Dear Dr. Wilson:


    We write with extreme concern regarding the proposed closure of the National Archives and co-located Federal Records Center at San Francisco. It is essential that this location remain open and accessible to researchers and the general public. As scholars, writers, researchers, and community leaders whose work is deeply invested in Hawaiian and Samoan history, we urge NARA to keep this location, as well as the regional archives also slated for closure in Seattle and Chicago, open.


    We write specifically to advocate for the NARA San Francisco location to remain open because its records are particularly essential for research on the law, politics, society, and history of Hawaiʻi and American Samoa. Researchers and the public have a right to access these crucial records. Access to them is necessary for the rights of citizens. The closure of NARA San Francisco, and potential relocation of its collections to an undisclosed location farther away from Hawaiʻi and American Samoa, would directly impinge on those rights. NARA San Francisco must remain in place and open to the public.


    Access to the collections in NARA San Francisco is essential for deepening our understanding of major questions in Hawaiian, Samoan, and United States history. This work is very much ongoing, and includes research in areas including: Native Hawaiians' and Samoans' experiences of U.S. territorial governments; the migration of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino and other Asians to Hawaiʻi, which holds an unusually large place in Asian American history; the debate in Hawaiʻi over U.S. occupation after annexation as a territory in 1898 and statehood in 1959; the debate on the status of American Samoa as a U.S. territory since its cession by chiefs in 1900; the buildup of U.S. military bases, notably including Pearl Harbor, and infrastructure in Hawaiʻi and American Samoa, both of which are sites of unparalleled (and hotly contested) importance in the extension of American power in the Pacific and Asia; the role of the federal government in the rise and decline of the major agricultural export crops of sugar, pineapple, and cotton and the attendant social, labor, and economic transformations of Hawaiʻi and Samoa; and many other issues. At a more personal level, the archives records of migration and citizenship provide many in our communities with genealogical sources that simply do not exist in any other archive. Their current location in San Bruno, CA, provides access to some of the longest established diasporic Hawaiian and Samoan communities in the continental U.S.


    Note that the vast majority of these records exist on paper only, not in digitized form. Moreover, they are so voluminous that digitization is unrealistic; they will continue to exist in only hard copy format into the future. Given that reality, the location of the archives is vitally important. The National Archives at San Francisco repository was built “on the promise that regionally created, historically valuable records would remain accessible to the communities that created them,” as the Organization of American Historians (OAH) has noted. The National Archives at San Francisco, located in the shadow of San Francisco International Airport, is one of the most readily accessible locations on the American continent for people in Hawaiʻi and Samoa. 


    We note the irony of pleading to keep an archive location in Northern California open to maintain public access, despite the fact that it requires a lengthy plane ride for those who live in Hawaiʻi or American Samoa. Nonetheless, moving them farther from the Pacific will make it near impossible for many to access. Many of the government records and historical documentation found in the National Archives' catalog are not even accessible in the Hawaiian or Samoan islands where they originated. The closure of the archives will cause an immeasurable loss of information currently in circulation that cannot be found elsewhere, resulting in the concealment of entire communities of people and the erasure of entire chapters of world history and the story of the United States.


    Further, we are alarmed at the possibility which we have heard from several different sources that at least some of the records from NARA San Francisco may be routed to the American Indian Records Repository in Lenexa, Kansas. As this facility’s website notes: “AIRR is restricted and not open to the general public. Direct access to the records maintained by the AIRR at the Federal Records Center is limited exclusively to authorized federal employees and federal contractors. Individuals seeking access to these records must contact the relevant offices of the Bureau of Trust Funds Administration, Bureau of Indian Affairs, or Bureau of Indian Education for further assistance.” It is widely known among scholars of Native American history that access to these records is functionally impossible. 


    Therefore, the impending closure of NARA San Francisco, at least for some portion of the archival record at that location, is not simply moving to the NARA location in Kansas City, Missouri, which is open to the public. The move means that access will be entirely lost, even if our scholars of Hawaiian and Samoan history can make it to the mid-west. This is outrageous, especially without giving our scholarly and heritage communities adequate advance notice.


    The NARA mission statement declares, “We preserve, protect, and share the historical records of the United States to promote public inquiry and strengthen democratic participation.” The purpose of a Federal Records Center is to make those records, which are the property of the public, available to the public. If those public records are not readily accessible to the public, public inquiry is squelched. If they are not readily accessible, democracy and democratic participation are undermined. 


    We urge NARA to preserve the National Archives at San Francisco, so that public access to public records can be a meaningful reality for people in Hawaiʻi, Samoa, and the Pacific.

    We previously emailed a version of this letter addressed to your predecessor, Ed Forst, on August 13 and received no reply.


    Sincerely,


    Contacts:

    Maile Arvin, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and Public Administration, University of Hawaiʻi, maile.arvin@hawaii.edu

    David Aiona Chang, Distinguished McKnight University Professor of History, University of Minnesota, dchang@umn.edu 

    As of Thursday, September 11, our letter has 332 signatories. See the full list here.

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