Grey Milk and Lost Kin: Re-sounding, Re-visioning, and Re-membering Trauma in the Scottish Gypsy Traveller Archives

"We have no right to any form of writing, that is our curse," proclaimed a 1950s Gypsy Queen (Lecouteux 2016, p.6). This research transforms the curse of "internalised oppression" (Davis 1981) as my ancestors incite an uprising by way of the archives. My practice-based research aims to retrieve and revalue "subjugated knowledge" (Foucault 1980) through critical archival interventions, place-based approaches, experimental filmmaking and literary practices. I will interrogate the absence and rupture of 'knowing' caused by forced assimilation and cultural dispossession, exploring the sociocultural impacts of knowledge suppression and its far reaching mechanisms of denial. Grounded in lived experience, this study adds to urgent scholarly work seeking to transform the cultural ramifications of colonial legacies which actively erase Indigenous and Local knowledge systems, their cultural heritage, and collective identity. My family avoided persecution by keeping our genealogy secret and disavowing our Scottish Gypsy Traveller ancestry.From the mid twentieth century onwards, vast institutional archives were amassed in Scotland of the travelling peoples' oral traditions. Newly accessible online since the pandemic, I will subvert these archives to activate the affective, cultural and experiential injuries of "racial capitalism", drawing out the traumatic traces of invisibility and exclusion (Gordon 2008). I will then reframe and valorise the Gypsy Travellers' knowledge system, building power relations through "re-citation" with other subjugated cosmologies. Finally, I will undertake an intersectional exploration emphasising the feminist and decolonising interventions of re-sounding, re-visioning and re-remembering, mobilising solidarity and liberatory consciousness to counteract "epistemic violence" (Galván-Álvarez 2010).Thus, I will create a body of work, including film, art and audio works, that act as "a counter-archive of knowledge"-underpinned by Indigenous narrative and listening strategies (Horavoka 2017). In this way, my research will contribute to experimental sonic and cinematic techniques and methodologies, whilst generating critical pathways that pluralise knowledge systems more widely.