What is the Global Register of Black and Indigenous Histories?
The GRBIH is not a part of the U.S. Department of the Interior the National Park Service. The GRBIH is an independent non-profit organization committed to the preservation of sites of black and indigenous histories according to a community-driven justice oriented process. The separation from the Department of Interior and the NPS is intentional. We seek to free these sites from the overview of global buracracies, pedagogical hegemony, and their biases. We seek to preserve according to the truth of those who were silenced and marginalized in making of this world.
What is our goal?
This project proposes a new approach to historical preservation that is not tied to colonial inventions of borders, but demands a historical preservation body that organizes around networks, rather than specific locations or sites that separate the conditions and histories of those in the Atlantic. Blackness of the diaspora and the Western hemisphere were not always separated by nation as the systems and cycles of colonialism created cross-cultural condition around blackness. Therefore, these sites and histories that depend on other ways of knowing and other geographies of knowing need a new system for planning. Similar to the National Register, the Global Register is a proposal system for Black and Indigenous groups to preserve their own sites across borders through networks of history that acknowledge different ways of knowing, including familial archives and oral histories. Our goal: an equitable approach to history that offers an equitable alternative to bureaucratic Western approaches of history that have defined global preservation practices.
What is tabby?
Tabby is a material not defined by borders, but what happens between them. The history of tabby weaves itself geographically across the globe, from North Africa, to Spain, to the Caribbean, to the American coast. Tabby traces histories of colonialism and capitalism united by the expanse of an ocean and defined by the shared creatures within it. The uniqueness of tabby is based in its process of collecting local and accessible materials, oysters and sand, to produce concrete through a non-measured/estimated process. The origin of tabby as either the North African tabbi, or the Spanish tapia, has long been debated and no conclusive evidence exists that points towards either location. This clouded absence of origin displays the character of tabbi’s history as both rooted and rootless; fluid and based in an intercultural exchange that removes tabby from the confinements of borders and a linear timeline of a beginning, middle, or end. In tabby’s move to the Western Hemisphere, its existence is blurred across socio-cultural divides as a symbol of militaristic power, the plantation economy, and the homes of the slaves who built both.
Tabby in its Form
Tabby’s way into the world and eventually the Americas, is not only a remnant of the past of mineral extraction and its labor but is also a confluence of geological scales of time along the waters of the Western American coast. It is not a story that begins on land, and to quote my previous statement, while it may commence on water, it does not necessarily end there. Rather, tabby represents a time and form of thinking in which the boundaries between land and water were grey and undefined, and the reprocessing and recycling of resources by Indigenous peoples across what is now America, produced material innovation. Therefore, tabby’s form must speak to the interactions between land and sea. This back and forth is even inherent in the initial phases of its making by the threshold between land and water in the Americas, of sand and oysters. These materials compose tabby, not by coincidence, but by geographical logic.
Global Register of Black and Indigenous Histories
Global Register of Black and Indigenous Histories is an on-going, open-source platform for data
collection on cross-cultural architectural and spatial forms.
The platform launched at the Porto Design Biennale 2023, and Portugal serves as our first site for
engagement.
As a vistor to this website, we ask you to enter and preserve historical networks from your memories,
photos, videos, and experiences. You can catalog the places you have been, grew up in, or wish to go,
whose architecture and materials speak to each other, These networks showcase the diasporic power of
materials and people through architecture and design.
Please use the form below to enter any architectural or sptial networks to our database. Scroll down
further to view the map containing your entries and others, and maps of historical sites in Porto.
Entry Form
The Global Register of Black and Indigenous Histories is an on-going, open-source platform for data
collection on cross-cultural architectural and spatial forms. The GRBIH is an independent non-profit
organization committed to the preservation of sites of black and indigenous histories according to a
community-driven, justice-oriented process. We seek to preserve according to the truth of those who
were silenced in the making of our world. Our platform launched at the Porto Design Biennale 2023, and
Portugal serves as our first site of engagement. As a visitor to this website we ask you to catalog
and preserve historical spatial networks from your memories, photos, videos, and experiences that
share similar materials, histories, and/or forms. You can catalog the places you have been, grew up
in, or wish to go whose architecture and materials speak to each other, showcasing the diasporic power
of materials and people. We aim to document others ways of knowing whether oral or haptic, that tell
our spatial histories. We ask that you please catalog each structure individually and we encourage you
to continue to catalog works during your time in Porto using the list of locations at the front of the
gallery.
O Registro Global de Histórias Negras e Indígenas é uma plataforma contínua e de código aberto para
coleta de dados sobre formas arquitetônicas e espaciais interculturais. O GRBIH é uma organização
independente sem fins lucrativos comprometida com a preservação de locais com histórias negras e
indígenas de acordo com um processo orientado pela comunidade e orientado para a justiça. Procuramos
preservar de acordo com a verdade aqueles que foram silenciados na construção do nosso mundo. A nossa
plataforma foi lançada na Porto Design Biennale 2023 e Portugal serve como o nosso primeiro site de
envolvimento. Como visitante deste site, pedimos que você catalogue e preserve redes espaciais
históricas a partir de suas memórias, fotos, vídeos e experiências que compartilhem materiais,
histórias e/ou formas semelhantes. Você pode catalogar os lugares onde esteve, cresceu ou deseja ir,
cuja arquitetura e materiais conversam entre si, mostrando o poder diaspórico dos materiais e das
pessoas. Nosso objetivo é documentar outras formas de conhecimento, sejam elas orais ou táteis, que
contem nossas histórias espaciais. Pedimos-lhe que catalogue cada estrutura individualmente e
encorajamo-lo a continuar a catalogar obras durante a sua estadia no Porto utilizando a lista de
localizações na frente da galeria
