Games as Enduring Presence / Elizabeth LaPensée
Games offer a space for Indigenous artists to reify the connections between tradition and technology since Indigenous games can directly engage players in Indigenous ways of knowing through design and aesthetic. The social impact game Survivance, the musical choose-your-own-adventure text game We Sing for Healing, and the mobile game Invaders exemplify games as self-determined spaces…
Read MoreKnowledge Organization from an Indigenous Perspective: The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology Project / Sandra Littletree and Cheryl A. Metoyer
Native Americans create, preserve, and organize knowledge within the context of community, thereby ensuring the inclusion of Native American philosophies. Historically, mainstream cataloging and classification systems have not adequately represented this knowledge. The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology was designed to incorporate an Indigenous perspective into mainstream controlled vocabularies. Using story as pedagogy,…
Read MoreProviding Cognitively Just Subject Access to Indigenous Knowledge through Knowledge Organization Systems / Heather Moulaison Sandy and Jenny Bossaller
This article explores cognitively just, reliable subject access to indigenous knowledge through knowledge organization systems (KOSs). Cognitive justice requires that indigenous people be able to access materials in a way that respects their worldview, yet dominant KOSs are based on positivist, Western approaches that are fundamentally incompatible. Alternatives to universal systems include the creation of…
Read MoreNative America’s twenty-first-century right to know / Allison Boucher Krebs
More than 30 years ago, in October of 1978, Standing Rock Sioux scholar Vine Deloria Jr. prepared a paper for The White House Pre-conference on Indian Library and Information Services On or Near Reservations titled “The Right to Know.” In his paper, Deloria establishes the United States Federal government’s treaty responsibility for Indian Country’s: …need…
Read MoreEncoding Culture: Building a Digital Archive Based on Traditional Ojibwe Teachings / Timothy Powell and Larry P. Aitken
This article addresses how the advent of technology can allow for the inclusion of indigenous stories in American literature history. Thus, this article is rooted in the assumption that may become a part of American literary history. It is the hope that through this integration of Native American culture through oral traditions and artifacts that…
Read MoreDecolonizing Ethnographic Documentation: A Critical History of the Early Museum Catalogs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History / Hannah Turner
To inform debates about decolonizing museum records, this article maps the history of cataloging at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when material heritage was collected for museums from Indigenous peoples, the knowledge within those communities was often measured against Eurocentric biases that saw Indigenous knowledge as the…
Read MoreCommunity + Museum: Guidelines for Collaboration
The Community and Museum collaboration guidelines were developed over a three-year period of collaboration between Native and non-Native museum professionals, cultural leaders and artists. The guidelines are intended as a resource for community members who are working in collaboration with museums. This is not a set of rules; instead, it offers ideas to consider when working…
Read MoreImagining: Creating Spaces for Indigenous Ontologies / Marisa Elena Duarte and Miranda Belarde-Lewis
For at least half a century, catalogers have struggled with how to catalog and classify Native American and Indigenous peoples materials in library, archive, and museum collections. Understanding how colonialism works can help those in the field of knowledge organization appreciate the power dynamics embedded in the marginalization of Native American and Indigenous peoples materials…
Read MoreThe (De-)Universalization of the United States: Inscribing Maori History in the Library of Congress Classification
This chapter demonstrates how the University of Waikato in New Zealand adapted a global standard (the Library of Congress Classification) for local use by inscribing topics related to and about Māori history and people. The University of Waikato’s classification simultaneously uses and implicitly critiques a universal system written from a U.S. vantage point. It seems…
Read MoreParticipation, Design, Empathy, Justice: The User Experience with Underrepresented Populations (UXUP) Project / Scott Young
This case study discusses a Participatory Design pilot project at Montana State University: User Experience with Underrepresented Populations (UXUP), in which Native American students and a librarian co-created a new community outreach tool. It provides an in-depth view into the UXUP design process, with further discussion of outcomes, limitations, assessments, and recommendations for implementing Participatory…
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