Preserving cultural heritage in times of war

Nathaniel Brunt is on an urgent mission. The interdisciplinary scholar and award-winning documentary photographer is creating the Conflict Aftermath Digital Archive Project (CADAP). Using field experience and drawing on the expertise of University of Victoria librarians, historians and other documentarians, Brunt is developing innovative ethical digital archival methods and resources to preserve and make publicly accessible at-risk visual material in conflict and post-conflict contexts. But the clock is ticking as the community he is working with, the Yazidis in northern Iraq, face the challenges of living in the aftermath of a genocide as they rebuild their lives.

As an Aspiration 2030 post-doctoral fellow with UVic Libraries, Brunt is working with librarians who have expertise in the ethics of working with archival materials in vulnerable communities, digital preservation, digital asset collection, metadata, and the challenges of working with Indigenous materials.

Preserving Yazidi cultural heritage

When Brunt regularly returns to Iraq, his full attention is on accessibility and ethical preservation­­—at stake are the oral histories in the everyday life of the Yazidis, a religious minority, that are currently being collected through interviews in Iraq and Kurdistan. Brunt’s project combines professional visual documentation with non-traditional archival material from the community such as family photographs, oral histories, and mobile phone images and videos.

In August 2014, Da’esh/ISIL attacked about 20 villages and towns in the Sinjar region, the Yazidi’s ancestral homeland in north-west Iraq, and killed more than 5,000 people. Instantly, 500,000 Yazidis became refugees, while hundreds of thousands fled to the autonomous Kurdistan region in northern Iraq where they continue to live in displaced persons camps.

Through CADAP, Brunt will create a unique set of resources that will not only support the communities directly involved in his fieldwork and projects, but also create a body of research that provides strategies, methods, and concepts that can be mobilized by others globally to aid in the long, complex, and challenging process of communities seeking to make sense of the aftermath of conflict.

The Yazidi digital archive project aims to preserve at-risk audiovisual material, often stored on cellphones, with Yazidi communities in Iraq and the diaspora. “This important, yet ephemeral historical evidence, is quickly being lost without preservation,” says Brunt. “The project emerges as a response to the genocide of the Yazidi population and serves as an act of resistance against this violent attempt at erasure.” With a focus on their lives in Sinjar before 2014, the events of the genocide, and their present-day lives, this digital archival initiative will highlight the human dimensions of the project.

Our idea was to look at the more experiential side of things, and what people went through. Not necessarily just looking at the events that represented the worst days of their lives, but also much more broadly, their family histories, their lives, outside of the genocide.” 

—Nathaniel Brunt, Interdisciplinary scholar, documentary photographer and Aspiration 2030 Post-Doctoral Fellow

With the support of UVic librarians Lisa Goddard, Dean Seeman, Laura Doublet, Corey Davis, and Matt Huculak, Brunt is learning about best practices in digital asset collection, the structure of metadata that is culturally appropriate but accessible and creating the caretaking infrastructure for the Yazidi community’s digital preservation project.

Early influences and academic work

Born to a storied multi-generational family of journalists, including an award-winning grandfather, Brunt was drawn to war as a teenager, cementing his destiny at a young age.

When asked about his childhood influences, Brunt’s maternal grandfather Andrew MacFarlane comes to mind. Working as a reporter, MacFarlane covered the Cuban Revolution of the 1950s, winning two national newspaper awards: the 1958 Staff Corresponding, Foreign Reporting newspaper award, and the 1959 Spot News Reporting newspaper award, both as a writer for the Toronto Telegram. Responsible for laying the foundation for many present-day Canadian journalists, MacFarlane became the founding dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of Western Ontario.

News reporting runs deep in the family DNA. Brunt’s mother worked as a journalist at the Toronto Sun and CBC and is currently a freelance writer; Brunt’s father was a journalist for the Globe and Mail and is a sports broadcaster––both can be credited as early powerful influences shaping his aspirations.

Brunt studied the visual representation of the cultural history of war with two history degrees. His undergraduate degree at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), focused on the Vietnam War and popular perceptions from a photographic viewpoint. For his master’s degree at the University of Kent (War, Media and Society), Brunt examined First World War medical photography and the photographic history and social experiences of facially disfigured British soldiers.

Further studies took him back to TMU where he pursued a second master’s degree in Communication and Culture, photographing and exploring the lives of young Kashmiri militants fighting in the ongoing insurgency in the region, followed by a PhD studying stories and photos of the conflict in the Kashmir Valley.

Currently, Brunt is pursuing a three-year post-doctoral fellowship and works closely with affected Yazidi communities and an international team to ensure a collaborative and ethical approach is used in preserving their archives under the guidance of University of Victoria University Librarian Jonathan Bengtson, with additional support from Oliver Schmidtke (director, Centre for Global Studies), and professor Cynthia Milton. 

He first became interested in working with libraries when he was a student working part-time at TMU library and met Bengtson through Carol Shepstone, TMU former chief librarian. After their initial conversation, Brunt gravitated towards the idea that university libraries could be involved in the type of work that he was doing, namely examining the intersection of archival studies, documentary, photojournalism, and history. A year later, Brunt was subsequently offered a post-doctoral fellowship at UVic Libraries where he would be able to collaborate with librarians.

Using a community-based approach of archiving, these projects embed community members directly in the archival and memory-making processes through a framework that involves training, capacity building, support, and collaborative decision-making. It is an ethical collaboration.”

—Jonathan Bengtson, UVic University Librarian 

Interdisciplinary approach to documentary photography

When Brunt decided early on that he needed real-world experience in the field, he took inspiration from documentary photographer, MacArthur Fellow, and Guggenheim Fellowship recipient Susan Meiselas, well known for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. Initially her work came out of a documentary photographic tradition, but according to Brunt, it shifted more into cultural studies, bringing a critical perspective to the ways that photography shapes perceptions of various cultures and events.

I'm a documentarian, and researcher, if I'm asked about it,” explains Brunt on the distinction between passive and active photography. “I do projects that have gone away from the traditional kind of sense of documentary photography, and involves not just the production of images, but also working with community members and their images to preserve and make them appropriately accessible.” 

—Nathaniel Brunt, Interdisciplinary scholar, documentary photographer and Aspiration 2030 Post-Doctoral Fellow

This practice-informed research forms the framework for Brunt’s current collaborative photographic archival initiatives: the Kashmir Valley Archive, and working with the Yazidi community.

In 2012, when Brunt completed his first master’s degree, he moved to Southeast Asia where he began to hone his craft.  The following year, Brunt took a photography trip to Kashmir to document the uprising there by collecting and digitizing ephemera, family photographs, and other archival material. It was then that he began to understand the need for a paradigm shift from a single narrow focus to one that embraces the complex historical and cultural distinction of the region.

By focusing on cultivating change under the leadership of Brunt along with international teams in Kashmir and Iraq, and UVic Libraries, the CADAP clearly supports collaborative approaches with global partners; knowledge mobilization; risk-taking; creating a culture of trust and respect; and fostering the uses of spaces and resources to grow transformative ideas, partnerships, education, and communities of practice.

In asymmetric forms of war (the most dominant form of modern warfare), such as civil, ethnic, and intrastate conflicts, documentation is often limited and memory institutions such as archives and museums often do not exist. This is due to the nature of this type of conflict, in which dominant groups and/or the state possess a disproportionate control of material resources and power over the way the historical narrative is recorded.” 

—Nathaniel Brunt, Interdisciplinary scholar, documentary photographer and Aspiration 2030 Post-Doctoral Fellow

Documentary photography and its intersection with history and humanity

In the 2024 Times Higher Education (THE) Impact Rankings, UVic placed third in Canada and 13th in the world for its work toward implementing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The thrust of Brunt’s work mirrors numerous SDGs, namely: Good Health and Well-Being; Clean Water and Sanitation; Reduced Inequalities; and Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, and supports at-risk communities with documenting, preserving, and mobilizing their own histories to minimize the gaps in the historical record.

In his post-doctoral studies, Brunt moves away from traditional documentary photography and leans into the Yazidi digital archive project by taking a cultural studies approach, like Meiselas’ groundbreaking work––embedding himself into war zones where human rights violations and geo-political warfare intersect.

Plans to travel in early 2024 with four UVic librarians to Duhok in northern Iraq were underway with a focus on supporting the Yazidi community, with best practices in metadata and digital preservation work, including workshops and on-the-ground training using their mobile digitalization unit. However, an unexpected conflict arose in a nearby region and the trip was postponed, with plans to hopefully reschedule.

Since first arriving to Victoria in fall 2023, Brunt has met several UVic faculty and credits Germanic and Slavic Studies professor Charlotte Schallie, who is an award-winning documentarian, with adding to this body of research with her expansive scholarly work retelling the stories of Holocaust survivors with a graphic novel lens. 

With the CADAP goal of creating best practices for community-based archiving, Brunt plans to produce a white paper, open access education resources, exhibits, online digital archives, and research publications that can be used to guide similar work, not just for other post-doctoral fellows, but for the broader community.

In his role as the inaugural director of UVic Libraries’ Kula: Libraries Future Academy, Huculak will be developing partnerships with projects like Brunt’s CADAP––drawing on existing library infrastructure and expertise in which libraries and archives enter collaborative relationships to preserve, provide community-directed access, and amplify the voices of underrepresented and/or suppressed communities. 

Responsibility and ethics during times of war

Brunt firmly believes that Canadians have a responsibility to engage with the world’s troubled histories and properly preserve and learn from the past in an ethical way. His hope for the culmination of this multi-year project is that CADAP will provide documentation of methods, ethics, and strategies that can guide and assist academic research libraries in the production of similar projects in other conflict and post-conflict settings.

Critical projects like this give communities the tools and support they need to urgently preserve cultural heritage both in their traditional territories and in the diaspora. Brunt’s work highlights the potential for the CADAP to lead to positive changes in the relationships between minority communities and institutions like libraries, and the importance of learning from UVic's expertise in dealing with complex histories like the Holocaust, and Canada's residential school system.

Brunt explains that he wants to “raise awareness about this critical but neglected area of research among international audiences, and expand the set of methods and tools available to them to support their own work on these important issues surrounding memorialization of war and the process of peace and reconciliation.”

When he was a teenager reading Newsweek magazines, Brunt may have surreptitiously mapped out his career. However, his commitment goes beyond the need to critically examine warfare and its visual representations. He is driven by his humanity and the desire to help people save the history and memories of their communities––and to give them hope.

With Canadians involved in this project––and the country has dealt with its own troubled histories–– I do think in some way we have a responsibility to engage with these difficult subjects. We need to figure out a way to properly preserve and learn from the past in an ethical way.”

—Nathaniel Brunt, Interdisciplinary scholar, documentary photographer and Aspiration 2030 Post-Doctoral Fellow