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 through standardization, misnaming, and other practices. The decolonizing methodology of imagining provides one way that knowledge organization practitioners and theorists can acknowledge and discern the possibilities of Indigenous community-based approaches to the development of alternative information structures.

Duarte, M. E., & Belarde-Lewis, M. (2015). “Imagining: Creating Spaces for Indigenous Ontologies.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 53(5–6), 677–702.

This historical reading from 1971 critiques the Library of Congress Classification system’s treatment of indigenous peoples, highlighting issues such as segregating American Indians from the United States, arranging American Indian history with bias, and representing American Indians as “savages.” Yeh offers proposals for improving the classification system, which is followed by comments and rebuttal from Frosio of the Library of Congress.

While the article offers interesting documentation of the long debate librarians and catalogers have had regarding ethical description and representation of indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups, it is definitely dated from a modern standpoint (for example, though it criticizes calling indigenous peoples “savages” and erasing their contemporary history and existence, the article also privileges problematic concepts like assimilation and United States government rule “civilizing” American Indians.