For
if the knowledge systems that animate a culture are subjugated because they
have been made invisible, called primitive or savage, one can easily be lulled
into believing that the knowledge systems have been eliminated through an
effective and uncompromising series of removals— removals from place, removals
from people—all the while assuming a removal from meaning, and from animated
being. In fact, though, these Indigenous knowledge systems are infinitely
patient, assuming a posture of dormancy, waiting for the proper combination of
events and agents to align and catalyze a dramatic and seemingly inexplicable
change.[1]
In “Native America’s Twenty First Century
Right to Know”[1] Allison
Boucher Krebs reiterates and expands on Vine Deloria Jr’s 1978 speech about the
right of Native peoples to “know the past, to know the traditional alternatives
advocated by their ancestors, to know the specific experiences of their
communities, and to know about the world that surrounds them.”[2]
Both Krebs and Deloria recognize information and knowledge as crucial resources
for the realization and safeguarding of Native Sovereignty and the general
wellbeing of communities in the aftermath of colonial experiences that have disrupted
Indigenous livelihoods, cultural practices and identities. As scholars such as Sandra
Littletree and Cheryl Metoyer argue, Indigenous philosophy has much to
contribute to the safeguarding of Native histories, knowledge traditions and
sociocultural resources. It provides a more accurate, ontologically congruent and
grounded framework for organizing, classifying, and cataloguing Indigenous
knowledge and information. Yet, within Library and Information Studies (LIS) the
role of Indigenous philosophy in knowledge organization remains an underexplored
issue. Although a cohort of Indigenous scholars and their allies continue to
work on expanding the field’s understanding of Indigenous issues, the dominant
mode in the field tends to be rather limited. The primary focus remains on how
to best incorporate materials about Indigenous people into Western knowledge
organization and recordkeeping systems—there is little focus on what Indigenous
philosophies can contribute to the field overall.[3]
In this essay, I argue that the field
of archival studies, and information studies more broadly, needs to more
robustly engage with Indigenous philosophies, knowledge organization and
archival frameworks as important sites of knowledge that have the potential to be
transformative for the field. It is necessary that the discourse moves past its
preoccupation on how to incorporate indigenous materials into Western knowledge
organization frameworks. We need to have a more robust discussion and
exploration of the possibilities of “Indigenous philosophy as the structure for
organizing information.”[4]
A primary way to realize this may be to more robustly support existing and encourage
ongoing investigations into Indigenous knowledge organization and recordkeeping
systems in various contexts. It is my
hypothesis that this will be fruitful for positively rethinking dominant
values, principles, and practices within the field. Ultimately, as Krebs
argues, this is a matter of preventing deliberate cultural genocide of Native philosophies
as well as decolonizing the field of LIS.
Libraries, Archives and
Museums scholar Tyson Rinio writes that “all cultures need to store and retrieve
information.”[5]
This simple, yet radical statement speaks to the fact that Indigenous people
the world over have mechanisms through which they record, preserve and share
information—a fact that is usually overlooked or not fully recognized within the
archival studies literature. Indeed, no human society—orally based or
otherwise, can exist without a robust knowledge organization, memory and
recordkeeping mechanism. However, this simple reality is obscured by the fact
that prevailing Western understanding (including those within LIS) assumes that
only societies with written texts keep records—a colonialist perspective that
privileges the written text (a very recent invention) while silencing the
existence of multiple modes of recordkeeping dating back thousands of years.[6]
Part of what drives this assumption is the widely held belief
that the written word is not only a superior form of communication and
recordkeeping, but also an example of civilizational superiority.[7] This is partly what explains the marginalization of
nonwestern, and nontextual histories and recordkeeping mechanisms—an issue that
obviously impacts IS.
In
“Creating Spaces for Indigenous Ontologies”[8]
Marisa Elena Duarte and Miranda Belarde-Lewis explore the role of colonialism
in the devaluing of Indigenous ontologies within the field of libraries,
archives, and museums. Specifically, they pay attention to the ways in which
racial prejudice seeps into and shapes the production of subject headings and
classification systems. Far from being neutral processes, they argue that
classification and cataloguing are imbued with power relations that determine
who gets to decide what terms, and names are used to classify a people’s
cultural and historical materials. In a glaring example, they remind us that
the origin of the term “American Indian” is rooted in a practice dating back to
the late 1500s, when Spanish colonial authorities incorrectly referred to Indigenous
people as “Indians.” Along with the term Indian, terms such as ‘Native
American’ ‘American Indian’ emanated originally, not from the people’s own
designation of themselves, but from the power of colonial state authorities to
name and classify a community as they saw fit. Such a power to name and
classify a people means that the way Indigenous people conceptualize and live
out their own identities, affiliations and philosophies is flattened and
obscured. Within LIS, this ontological flattening has a huge consequence as it
not only contributes to the erasure of Indigenous self-conceptualization, but
it also encourages continuing development of knowledge based on colonial, biased,
imprecise, and sometimes outright incorrect/inaccurate information about entire
communities.
Duarte
and Belarde-Lewis pose an important question for the field of LIS, asking “how
do we create new spaces for Indigenous ontologies to emerge?”[9]
Using the example of the Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian
Terminology Project, Littletree and Metoyer provide an answer by way of
demonstrating both the limitations of Western knowledge organization frameworks
and also the contribution of Indigenous philosophy to altering dominant modes of
description, cataloguing and classification to create more nuanced, specific
and culturally grounded information systems. As an example of Indigenous-based
knowledge organization, the Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus seeks to address the
silences, confusions and erasures that are created when non-Indigenous
vocabularies and models are employed to describe Indigenous relationships,
peoples and objects within the field of LIS. It is an illustration of the rich
possibilities offered when we look outside dominant paradigms of information
organization.
[1] Krebs, Native America’s twenty-first century right to know.
[3] Kelvin
White, Shilpa Rele, Yang Lu, Sue McKemmish, Anne Gilliland, and Andrew Lau.
"Pluralizing the Archival Paradigm Through Education: critical discussions
around the Pacific Rim." Archives and Manuscripts 35, no.
2 (2007).
[4] Sandra Littletree and Cheryl A. Metoyer. "Knowledge
organization from an indigenous perspective: The Mashantucket Pequot thesaurus
of American Indian terminology project." Cataloging &
Classification Quarterly 53, no. 5-6 (2015): 640-657: 641.
[5] Tyson S. Rinio. "Cultural Relevance in Tribal
Libraries." Indigenous Notions of Ownership and Libraries,
Archives and Museums 166 (2016): 181: p.
182.
[6] Fiona Ross, Sue McKemmish, and Shannon Faulkhead.
"Indigenous knowledge and the archives: designing trusted archival systems
for Koorie communities." Archives and Manuscripts 34, no.
2 (2006): 112.
[7] Linda
Tuhiwai Smith. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous
peoples. Zed Books Ltd. 2013.
[8] Marisa E Duarte and Miranda Belarde-Lewis. "Imagining:
creating spaces for indigenous ontologies." Cataloging &
Classification Quarterly 53, no. 5-6 (2015): 677-702.
[9] Duarte & Belarde-Lewis, Creating Spaces for Indigenous Ontologies:
686.
[1] Allison
B Krebs. "Native America’s twenty-first-century right to know," Archival
Science 12, no. 2 (2012): 186.
