This paper follows a trans-disciplinary and trans-cultural arts research endeavour which seeks to utilise the restitution of neglected archival materials to engage the social and cultural trajectory of the villages and nation from which that material and intangible heritage was taken, stolen, destroyed, lost, or diminished. The paper engages with tensions in colonial and decolonial design of digital heritage between the potential for counter-histories and imaginaries on the one-hand and the colonial impulse of computing and its logics on the other. Through the research through design activities formed with a decolonial praxiology, we explore how the systems, practices and technologies of archival practices in this project develop an ethics of knowledge-making that neither satisfies or diminishes decolonial intent. We tentatively argue for approaches to decolonial design that are accounted for in local and pragmatic modes of knowledge making that are delinked from globalised and abstracted systems that otherwise repress them.