The archival fundamentals are Provenance, Original Order, Finding Aid, and Protocol of Native American Archival Materials. Provenance, also known as Respect Des Fonds, is the information regarding the origins, custody, and ownership of an item or collection. It also protects records' content, structure, integrity, and context. Fonds are containers containing a specific creator's material, such as an organization, family, or individual. Different countries use different terms for fonds; for example, the term archive group is used in England. The U.S. National archives use the term record group here in the United States.
Original order is the organization and sequence of records established by the creator of those records. It preserves the arrangement, method, logical structure, existing relationships, and evidential significance of how the creator accesses their records. However, the original order doesn't necessarily mean it is in the order in which materials were received. The materials may have been distributed because of inactive use before transferring them to archives. Thus, it is necessary to reconstruct the original order, the process of returning materials to the organization and sequence established by their creator. There are five levels of arrangement: Repository, Record Group, Series, File Unit, and Item. The repository is the archives itself, where it is stored, the institution. The record group is the collection in the repository. Series are within the record group, which are categories with different functions. File unit is each file in a fond. Lastly, an item is an individual piece in the file unit. We must note that we do not itemize archive collections like museum artifacts. Next, finding aid are tools that help users find information in a specific record group, collection, or series of archival materials; some examples of finding aid are Arizona Archives Online, Library of Congress, and South Dakota Digital Archives.
Lastly and most importantly, the Protocol of Native American Archival Materials is essential to protecting traditional knowledge and tribal sovereignty. Native Americans, also known as American Indians, have been fighting for their Indigenous rights and social justice since their first contact with European settlers. American Indians are the first people of what is now North America and are sovereign nations. There are 573 plus federally recognized tribes here in the U.S. Each tribe has a distinctive language, history, culture, and traditional knowledge. These four items are essential to the American Indian perspective and philosophy. Each tribe has cultural knowledge to be shared only with their people, not the public, for example, ceremonies, seasonal animal stories, and traditional stories. These traditional ceremonies and stories may be documented in books and the like. However, these documents exploit our culture and go against our traditional teachings. The Constitution of the United States mentions Indians specifically in Article 1, section 1, clause 3, "excluding Indians not taxed," and, most importantly, in Article 1, section 8, clause 3, in which the powers of Congress are enumerated. Article II, section 2, clause 2, the treaty-making clause, does not explicitly state Indians or Indian tribes, but treaties are the supreme law of the land. Therefore, American Indians are domestic nations with treaties within the U.S. and are the only ethnic group with distinctive individual governments.