Samantha Mills: Preservation of History Never Ends

Samantha Mills’s short story “Rabbit Test” won the Nebula, Locus, and Sturgeon awards, and her collection Rabbit Test and Other Stories was released by Tachyon Publications in April. In addition to her work as a writer, she’s an archivist in a local historical society, managing both their archival collections and their research library. We caught up with Mills recently to talk about her work as an archivist and how it influences her creative work.

“I think a lot about forgotten histories, the day-to-day lives of ordinary people that weren’t considered important enough to save at the time,” Mills tells EveryLibrary. “Most people don’t go out of their way to record things that feel commonplace. Why explain what everybody already knows? So what we have are bits and pieces, much of it saved on accident, tantalizing facts about various eras without enough contemporary accounts to fully flesh it all out. This fractured, incomplete view of history keeps making its way into my work.”

Mills specifically writes about archiving and historical preservation in several of her stories as well as her novel The Wings Upon Her Back. “In ‘Strange Waters,’ a fisherwoman is lost in time, seeing glimpses of her city’s evolution over centuries, and city archivists are eager to fill the many gaps in their master history book,” she says. “In ‘Rabbit Test,’ there are so many historical fragments that by the end of the story, they overwhelm the central narrative. In The Wings Upon Her Back, factions in the city are actively fighting over whether to preserve ‘heretical’ works in an attempt to shape how the city’s history is taught.”

Her new collection Rabbit Test and Other Stories grapples with the theme of memory and what is remembered. “I keep returning to the cyclical nature of history and how society progresses, regresses, and progresses again,” she tells us.

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Mills often thinks about how every primary source that we encounter was written from a specific perspective, and how what we think about a time period changes as we consider more perspectives. “When I create a fantasy world, or even set something in the future of our own world, I’m keenly aware that our understanding of history is always changing,” she says. “There will always be huge gaps in our understanding of the past, and we’ll never discover a single, convenient master record that clearly and uncomplicatedly explains the origins of anything.”

It’s also important to remember that, like primary sources from the past, everything we read about present-day current events has a perspective, too. “We are always considering the past through the lens of the present,” Mills tells us. “We teach history as a story of what led to the current day, and our understanding of the present changes when we uncover more information about how we got here.”

We were also curious to talk to her about the different roles of archives and libraries. Mills sees archives as more permanent collections. “With some limited exceptions, everything we take in is meant to be stored forever and never weeded out,” she tells us. “But researchers can’t browse the shelves or check material out, which makes access more difficult than at a library. Everybody has to go through an archivist, and the way that archivists choose to describe collections has a big effect on what is available to see, and whether it comes up in a search in the first place.”

Mills takes the responsibility of assisting researchers seriously. “Their end product is going to be directly impacted by what I am able to dig up for them, and they can’t write about something if I don’t know that we have it. There’s also proximity at play: Are there materials I can scan and send by email, or does the researcher have to come in person? If they are traveling, how many hours can we fit into their visit when my own work hours are quite limited? It’s a constant struggle trying to balance preserving the collections for the future while providing access to them in the present.”

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The present is, of course, also becoming history as we speak. Archivists play an important role in determining what gets remembered. “I’m starting to hit an age where younger people vaguely describe a historical event that I was alive during, and I realize it’s already a blur of simplified history book bullet points for them,” Mills says. “This always reminds me that my understanding of the decades before my birth is similarly flattened. Even widespread knowledge can be lost in a generation or two when there isn’t a desire to pass it on.”

Mills is also concerned about the long-term storage of digital media. “I know that if I properly box up documents and photographs, then in fifty or a hundred years, a future researcher can open that box and access the contents the same as I can now. But our digital materials will need to be actively maintained and migrated to new systems regularly, or we’ll end up losing it all,” she says. “We are simultaneously headed into an era of increased worldwide access to collections, and also an era of fragility in which those collections can be lost as soon as funding to maintain a server falters.”

Mills’s professional experience has also influenced her understanding of whose stories get told and whose are overlooked. “I’ll never forget working on a collection of oral histories that were recorded in the 1950s, interviewing pioneers who lived in our city in the late 1800s,” she says. “The surviving dictabelt copies weren’t playable, so we only had the original transcripts to use. Imagine our surprise when we digitized the dictabelts and discovered that the original recordings often included the wives of the men being interviewed, but their answers weren’t considered important enough to include on the transcripts!”

Mills hopes that her work encourages readers as well as researchers to think about systems of knowledge and power. “The preservation of history is an active process that never ends,” she tells us. “We have to understand where we came from in order to understand the world we live in right now, and as a result, the teaching of history is always political. When a Supreme Court justice claims that ‘a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the nation’s histories and traditions,’ this can only be fought through the teaching of our nation’s history. When politicians claim that trans identities are a modern invention, again, this is contradicted by historical records, which is why Nazis burned records at the Institute for Sexual Research in the 1940s, and it is why modern politicians are trying to drive trans narratives out of books and other media today. It is our duty as archivists to protect these records so that future generations can make informed decisions about the issues of their time.”

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