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Indigenous data has a history of bad management from non-Natives, says ������̳ Assistant Professor Sandy Littletree (Eastern Shoshone/Navajo). Library collections may include sacred songs, ceremonies and stories that were gathered without consent and never meant to be shared. Archival information on tribal cultures is often misleading, inauthentic, disrespectful. Even Western cataloguing systems may be biased, says Littletree, who works with the Library of Congress updating such subject headlines as “Indian Influences on Art.”

The label suggests Native Americans are mere side players in artistic fields. “It looks at Indigenous people as being outsiders, not insiders,” says Littletree (Ph.D. ’18), who was recently awarded the Jill and Joe McKinstry Endowed Faculty Fellowship in Native North American Indigenous Knowledge. 

The fellowship will allow Littletree to build new theoretical research models and recruit more Indigenous Ph.D. students in the emerging field of Indigenous librarianship, passing on skills needed to conduct respectful research and evaluate sources, citation practices and data analysis. 

“Sandy is an excellent candidate for this fellowship. At the heart of her teaching, research, and service at the university and with tribal communities, she seeks not only to inform or instruct, but to enlighten,” says Information School Associate Professor Emeritus Cheryl Metoyer (Eastern Band Cherokee), one of the country’s first Native American information science scholars and a mentor to Littletree.

The three-year fellowship was created by Joe and Jill McKinstry to support Indigenous scholarship at the school. The first fellowship recipient was Miranda Belarde-Lewis (Zuni/Tlingit), an Information School associate professor whose work contextualizes and celebrates Native art and artists. Belarde-Lewis and Littletree work together under the school’s Native North American Indigenous Knowledge initiative, focusing on ways to decolonize thinking around organizing Indigenous knowledge and shape change.

Colonial approaches in mainstream librarianship — a field dominated by white practitioners — have long created mistrust among Indigenous peoples traumatized by settlers who invaded their lands and tried to destroy their languages, traditions and culture. A credo of early boarding school boosters was to “kill the Indian and save the man.” 

The mistrust has ignited an Indigenous sovereignty movement focused on ensuring Native people have a say in how data is collected, stored and accessed. “Colonialism has taken so much from us, from so many aspects of our lives,” says Littletree. “The more we acknowledge and see how it has impacted us, the more you see it happening around you constantly.”

Littletree, a first-generation college graduate, grew up in northwest New Mexico, near the Navajo Nation border. The nearest tribal library was a daunting 90-mile drive away and her family did not go. She never dreamed of being a librarian. Her interest was sparked when she was working toward a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction at New Mexico State University. Littletree was student teaching at a high school on the Navajo Reservation and spent time in its library grading papers and talking with the librarian. One day the librarian handed her an old, printed email. It was from a professor at the University of Texas at Austin advertising scholarships for Native Americans to go to library school there. 

She was enthusiastically accepted and, after finishing the first master’s degree, began a second in information studies at UT that took her to meet Indigenous librarians in New Zealand and Canada. Those experiences fired an interest in learning more about library and information services designed “for/with/by” Indigenous people. She took that interest to the ������̳, where she graduated in 2018, presenting a Ph.D. dissertation examining tribal library development in the United States.

Creating systems for, with and by Native peoples requires tribal community input, respect, responsibility, and a recognition that everything Indigenous in a library institution has historical layers of connection to land and ceremony and people and places, says Littletree. “This relationality impacts the way you catalog information, the way you teach about it, the way you organize it, the way you provide access to it.”

Some tribal libraries are already doing this complex work. Instead of being catalogued alphabetically, some Indigenous cataloguing systems are now organized by clan or by geographical location of tribes. These libraries are removing non-Natives who write about Natives — like Tony Hillerman — from Native-authored book categories. Libraries are showing that Indigenous knowledge exists beyond the written word by presenting live storytelling, dance, and presentations on material culture including basketry and beadwork. 

Littletree envisions future libraries where Indigenous people feel welcomed by people who they trust and who understand and respect their knowledge needs. It will take a lot of work — and a lot of time — to get there, she says. 

But Littletree takes the long view. “I think about my ancestors, my parents, my grandparents, all the relatives who have come before me and the work they have done that allowed me to be here. It may take years to see the impact of my work, but hopefully the generations that come after me will reap the benefits.”