This article reports on findings from qualitative research undertaken with a group of Aboriginal seniors in Toronto, Canada, to assess how a community-based collection of handcrafted objects could be used to evoke memories of maker culture (craft), as well as to foster meaning-making-all in the course of gathering elements requisite to representing each item in a documented surrogate. The article will discuss how the need to give voice to this unique collection both challenges and enriches traditional approaches to representing and organizing artifacts. A rethinking of surrogate records that center the Indigenous experience in the cataloging process is proposed.

First Story Toronto -a community organization dedicated to the Indigenous histories of Toronto, Canada -is steward to a collection of items mostly made and collected during the 20th century. With origins in the Anglican Church Women, the collection reflects a time when policies and actions of the state and churches internalized colonial processes within Canada. Yet the donation of the ACW material to a Native woman and housing advocate in 1976 hints at the shifting political and cultural contexts of this collection. Native crafts were used by Indigenous women in the city in displays of both Indigenous sovereignty and multiculturalism. Recently, the collection has been taken up by another group of Indigenous women in the Memory, Meaning-Making and Collections project. Handling sessions with artefacts and 'talking circles', initially designed to research the role of objects in collective memory and life-history processes, have been appropriated by the participating seniors toward their own goals. The collection has become a source of continuing education, sparking the women to teach and learn beadwork and quillwork; compare life experiences among urban Indigenous people; question history-making processes; and visit museum stores to handle collections and learn with curators. The histories intersecting with this collection thus push back against a range of tropes, provide more nuanced insights into

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