For Papua New Guineans, our stories are scattered across colonial vaults, sealed in museums, universities, and libraries across so-called “Australia,” the “United Kingdom,” and Europe. We are catalogued but not named, photographed but not seen, displayed but not heard. These archives turned living, thriving communities into evidence—objects of study rather than people of story.

Papua New Guinea’s modern archives were built in the image of the empire. From the late 1800s through Australian administration until Independence in 1975, missionaries, administrators, and anthropologists photographed and documented our lives under the oppressor’s gaze. These images and records now sit in institutions far from the people and places they depict. A nation of more than 800 languages—one of the most culturally diverse in the world—has had its visual memory largely held elsewhere. 

But memory cannot be contained. It moves in the breath of our languages, the rhythm of our dances, and the way we carry each other’s names and stories over time. 

It was from that remembering that Archive Ples—a community-led project I co-founded with Samira Homerang Saunders in 2019—was born. What began as a conversation between two Papua Niuginians living oceans apart has grown into a changemaking initiative reclaiming how we see, hold, and share our histories. We asked ourselves: What would it mean to hold our own archives? And what would it mean to remember on our own terms? 

In answering, we began to build a space where memory becomes resistance, and storytelling becomes a tool for collective liberation. 

From these questions grew a project to reframe the visual and narrative landscape of Papua New Guinea—not by mimicking colonial collections but by creating a living archive rooted in care, community, and sovereignty. 

Because colonial archives were never neutral, they were instruments of empire—collecting, classifying, and freezing Indigenous people in time. Missionaries photographed “converts,” administrators documented “subjects,” and anthropologists captured “vanishing tribes.” These images traveled far from the lives that they depicted, feeding a world that wanted to look at us but not listen. 

Yet we remembered anyway. Our memories moved underground—through song; through ceremony; through the quiet keeping of names, stories, and histories. Archive Ples doesn’t ask for permission. It continues the work of ancestors who remembered anyway. 

For many Papua New Guinea families, the only surviving image of their elders lies overseas, behind paywalls and permissions. These collections continue to shape how Papua Niuginians are seen by the world—and by ourselves— yet they remain out of reach. To be absent from your own archives is a form of dispossession.  Archive Ples is our refusal of that absence. It is our call to remember out loud, as a form of resistance. 

When Samira and I started, we had no funding—just a shared determination to foster a space where our people and allies could gather and share stories that reflect our community with dignity. We started by scanning our own family albums, retrieving images from big institutions, and inviting wantoks to share images of their own. Reclaiming these images wasn’t easy. Many images are held overseas, often mislabeled or misnamed. We spend months tracing them, writing to curators, searching digital databases, and, at times, confronting the painful realization that our families’ histories have been turned into research objects. 

In Tok Pisin, an English-based creole and the most widely spoken language in Papua New Guinea, the word ples means place, but it also holds a deeper meaning: home, belonging, land, and connection. By naming our project, Archive Ples, we anchored it to that sense of rootedness, that our archives are not sterile collections but are living extensions of home. 

The response was immediate. Families wrote that they had never seen certain photos of their elders. Young diasporic Papua New Guineans wrote that the photos have made them feel closer to home—reconnecting to a past they had never witnessed. What began as a small digital experiment became a collective act of remembering—a shared community archive of joy, grief, resilience, and return. 

Today, Archive Ples has reached more than 150,000 people across the world and has collected over a thousand community archives to date. Each contribution—whether a photograph, letter, or memory—extends the network of connection and care that continues to grow around the project. 

Most of our work happens online, we post photographs and invite the community to name, comment, and remember.  A single photo could flood a memory: someone in Port Moresby, the capital of the country, recognizes an old colonial building. Another in Sydney remembers the event itself. Another one living in London names the people in the frame. Now, a photo once labeled “unidentified native” becomes alive with kinship. 

When a family recognizes their elder in a colonial image marked simply “Papuan woman,” they wrote, “That’s my bubu. I’ve never seen her like this before.” In that moment, the image transformed—from object to ancestor, from extraction to return.

This is what decolonization looks like: not waiting for permission, but practicing reconnection. Archive Ples turns digital space into a gathering ground where memory fills the air and our people speak back to the archives that once spoke over us. Every image, every tok stori, every name restored is an act of sovereignty. 

Everyday photographs—a rugby game on the shores of the village, market mamas selling the food grown from their garden, cousins posing with their bilum bags and meri blouses after church—might seem ordinary, but in a world that renders us as relics, they are revolutionary. They insist that we are not fragments of history, but people in motion, shaping our present and our future. 

Visual storytelling is sovereignty. It is not preservation, but  presence. Not nostalgia, but continuity. Each photo affirms our right to see ourselves, speak for ourselves, and pass our stories forward. 

Archiving this way is also medicine. Many of our communities carry the wounds of displacement, missionization, and colonial schooling that taught us to forget. Gathering and sharing images begins to mend those fractures, reconnecting people to ples, to kin, and the memories that sustain us. Memory becomes medicine. Storytelling becomes restoration. Visibility becomes empowerment. 

Archive Ples is still very young, but our horizon is wide. We dream about community workshops in Port Moresby and across the land, where elders narrate history as youth digitize photographs, learning both technology and lineage. We imagine archives that are built on consent and care, where communities decide if their images are shared and who can see them. 

We remain part of the global Indigenous movement that is reclaiming photographs, recordings, and cultural materials. Return is not only restitution of objects—it is the restoration of dignity, identity, and relationship. 

When I return to the question—what does it mean to remember when an archive was never made for you?—I think about our elders whose names we have returned to a photograph, of young people finally seeing themselves reflected with pride, of families opening up these old albums and finding continuity with generations past. 

Archive Ples is one small thread in the larger fabric of Indigenous resistance, but it affirms this truth: We were here. We are here. We will continue to be here.