Decolonization, distance and ethics.pptx

DECOLONIZATION, DISTANCE AND ETHICS:
CATALOGUING & CLASSIFICATION OF
NORTH AMERICAN INDIGENOUS
KNOWLEDGE IN UK LIBRARIES
Nicole Brandon
For ARLISCataloguing & Classification Ethics Series
Fri 6 May 2022
Nicole
Brandon
nbrandon@dundee.ac.uk
Fri
6
May
2022
for
ARLIS
UK

Speaker
■ Nicole Brandon
■ Based in Edinburgh, Scotland
■ PhD Researcher in Science-
Fiction & Artificial Intelligence
at University of Dundee.
■ Recently completed a three-
month PhD Internship titled
“Contemporary North
American Indigenous
Knowledge at the British
Library”.
■ Was a librarian! When I was
ten.
■ Not an Indigenous Person of
NorthAmerica – but I was
born & raised there. Me &The USS Enterprise NCC-1701 at the Smithsonian Air & Space
Museum, September 2016
Nicole
Brandon
Fri
6
May
2022
for
ARLIS
UK

Precis
■ Decolonization
■ Distance
■ Ethics
■ North American Indigenous
Knowledge
■ UK Libraries
■ Cataloguing andClassification
“Native American communities have had extensive first-
hand experience with the ways that information resources
held in 'distant institutions' can impact their quality of life,
their practice of religion, and their future as a people—
sometimes with disastrous consequences, sometimes to
their benefit.” pg 5, First ArchivistsCircle, Protocols for Native
American Archival Materials
Nicole
Brandon
Fri
6
May
2022
for
ARLIS
UK

Defining “Distance”
■ This is not exclusively a matter of the
measurable physical distance of
thousands of miles between the UK
& Ireland and NorthAmerica.
■ Psychologically, the distance can and
does give rise to a “distancing effect”
that alters priorities of parties
involved in a distant relationship.
■ Distance can be navigated
inequitably, resulting in power
imbalances that are extremely
difficult to appreciate from one side,
and difficult to prevent from the
other.
■ Distance can also be used as means
of maintaining or enforcing
ignorance.
Nicole
Brandon
Fri
6
May
2022
for
ARLIS
UK

Defining “Ethics”
• Rely on the definition provided by Dr Deborah Lee in her excellent talk on 10 Dec 2021
“Cataloging and Classification Ethics”
• https://youtu.be/5dtEm68SYgQ
• We will use Lee’s focus on cataloguing ethics as an attempt to locate the moral dimension
(right and wrong)
• Grappling with ethical stances as librarians regarding neutrality, understanding of what is
factual, what knowledge is available to be housed in libraries, and the ethical tensions raised by
the extant systems for cataloguing and classification which most libraries have inherited.

Decolonization is Not A Metaphor
■ “Decolonization, which we assert is a distinct project from other civil and
human rights-based social justice projects, is far too often subsumed into
the directives of these projects, with no regard for how decolonization
wants something different than those forms of justice.” (p1)
■ “this kind of inclusion is a form of enclosure, dangerous in how it
domesticates decolonization. It is also a foreclosure, limiting in how it
recapitulates dominant theories of social change. […] we want to be sure
to clarify that decolonization is not a metaphor. When metaphor invades
decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters
whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it
entertains a settler future. Decolonize (a verb) and decolonization (a
noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks,
even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice
frameworks. The easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of
decolonization is yet another form of settler appropriation. When we write
about decolonization, we are not offering it as a metaphor; it is not an
approximation of other experiences of oppression. Decolonization is not a
swappable term for other things we want to do to improve our societies
and schools. Decolonization doesn’t have a synonym.” (p3)
■ Tuck, Eve &Yang,Wayne Decolonization is Not A Metaphor (2012) in
Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society
Tuck (below) is Unangax̂ and is an enrolled member of theAleutCommunity of St.
Paul Island, Alaska.Yang (above).

Decolonization is KnowledgeWork
■ “At it’s most basic, decolonization work is about the divestment of foreign occupying
powers from Indigenous homelands, modes of government, ways of caring for the people
and living landscapes, and especially ways of thinking.
■ For non-Indigenous individuals decolonization work means stepping back from normative
expectations that
– (1) all knowledge in the world can be represented in document form,
– (2) to some degree, already is,
– (3) Indigenous ways of knowing belong in state-funded university and government
library, archive and museum collections, especially for the benefit of society’s privileged
elite.” (p678)
Duarte, Marisa E & Belarde-Lewis, Miranda (2015) Imagining: Creating Spaces for Indigenous
Ontologies in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly.
Marisa E Duarte, PascuaYaquiTribe (R) Miranda Belarde-
Lewis, enrolled Zuni Pueblo and member of theTakdeintáan
Clan of theTlingit Nation (L)

Decolonization is KnowledgeWork
■ “When we understand how colonization works
through techniques of reducing, mis-naming,
particularizing, marginalizing, and ghettoizing,
we can better appreciate practices that more
accurately and precisely name, describe, and
collocate historically subjugated knowledge.”
p699
Marisa E Duarte, PascuaYaquiTribe (R) Miranda Belarde-
Lewis, enrolled Zuni Pueblo and member of theTakdeintáan
Clan of theTlingit Nation (L)

The word: Indigenous
■ “Indigenous peoples live on all continents, from theArctic to the
Pacific, viaAsia,Africa and the Americas.There is no singularly
authoritative definition of indigenous peoples under international
law and policy” UN OHCHR
■ “Many indigenous peoples populated areas before the arrival of
others and often retain distinct cultural and political characteristics,
including autonomous political and legal structures, as well as a
common experience of domination by others, especially non-
indigenous groups, and a strong historical and ongoing connection to
their lands, territories and resources, including when they practise
nomadic lifestyles.” UN OHCHR
Peters
Projection
Map
used
via
Creative
Commons
License:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peters_projection,_white_%26_blue.png
Nicole
Brandon
Fri
6
May
2022
for
ARLIS
UK

■ Why say ‘Indigenous’ instead of Native American, or First Nations, or
American Indian, or….
■ Currently, it is a useful term utilized by large enough proportions of
relevant parties to function.
■ Suggest that good practice is to only use it, as you will hear it used in this
talk, when describing this grouping of peoples who have common
experiences, situations and concerns based on being Indigenous. It is not
to be used as a stand-in because you forgot the name of the specific tribe,
nation or community you are meant to be talking about.
– i.e. how much sense would it make if I forgot I was talking about
Portugal and started calling them Europeans in the context of
specifically Portuguese cultural contexts such as dance or art forms
specific to their cultures, which existed prior to the conceptualization of
‘Europe’.

■ REMEMBER: “Indigenous peoples are incredibly diverse; there are all
sorts of internal arguments about which terms are best, what they
actually mean, why people should reject this and that, and so on.
What I’m okay with you calling me might really annoy someone else.
[…] Be aware: no matter how safe you think a term is, someone
somewhere might get upset if you call them that. No one can give you
a magical pass so you never have to re-examine the terms you are
using ” pg 8,Vowel, IndigenousWrites (2016)
ChelseaVowel is Métis from manitow-sâkahikan (Lac Ste.
Anne) Alberta, residing in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton).

■ In the spirit of EveTuck’s essay Suspending Damage (2009) I also want to
be sure you aren’t equating Indigenous peoples exclusively, or even
primarily, with marginalized or violated, or oppressed, or damaged
peoples.
■ “This is an open letter addressed to educational researchers and
practitioners concerned with fostering and maintaining ethical
relationships with disenfranchised and dispossessed communities
and all of those troubled by the possible hidden costs of a research
strategy that frames entire communities as depleted.” pg 409
■ “It is a powerful idea to think of all of us as litigators, putting the
world on trial, but does it actually work? Do the material and political
wins come through? And, most importantly, are the wins worth the
long-term costs of thinking of ourselves as damaged?” pg 415
EveTuck is Unangax̂ and is an enrolled member of the Aleut
Community of St. Paul Island, Alaska.

Key is Specificity
■ Use the accurate word for whom you are talking about. Specificity is required to generate
accurate ways to navigate your collections.There are homogenizing hold overs from legal
terminology which have gained and retained an outsized ‘grip’ on the nomenclature for
these distinct groups – but be aware of their relationship to actual people, now.
– i.e.: ‘Indian’ re: the Indian Act (1896) which still governs Canadian state relations to
many of its indigenous peoples, though ‘Indian’ is not in broad use as even a collective or
unrefined term for them.
■ With well over 600 distinct tribes, communities and nations in just the continental US and
Canada, whose pre-colonial contact names and locations (locations often being a key
element of names) are very different to their post-colonial contact names and location, this
is not a simple undertaking.
■ …particularly given the current systems such as Dewey and LOC that are in broad use.

Nasdijj
■ First published in Esquire, June 1999.
■ “Nasdijj tells of his adopted son,Tommy
Nothing Fancy, of the young boy's struggle
with fetal alcohol syndrome, and of their last
fishing trip together.This largely fictional
account is the memoir of a man who has
survived a hard life with grace, who has taken
the past experience of pain and transformed
it into a determination to care for the most
vulnerable among us, and who has found an
almost unspeakable beauty where others
would find only sadness.”
■ Abstract fromWorldCat entry:
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1192541760

“Nasdijj”
■ January 2006, Matthew Fleischer in LAWeekly published an expansive unearthing of
this “literary hoax”
– https://www.laweekly.com/navahoax/
■ InApril 2006,Andrew Chaikivski in Esquire published an account of his post-reveal sit-
down with “Nasdijj”
– “The LAWeekly story, "Navahoax," written by Matthew Fleischer, was correct in its
assertion: Nasdijj was the brazen invention ofTimothy Patrick Barrus, who grew up
and went to high school in Lansing, Michigan, whose father was employed by the
local power plant, and whose mother's family is Scandinavian. Fleischer found that
for years, Barrus had written gay leather porn and sadomasochistic novels.”
– https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a1128/esq0506nasdijj-138/

Suzan Shown Harjo is Cheyenne & Hodulgee Muscogee
“For Harjo and many Native Americans, the issue of identity extends well beyond
the existential or racial question of “Who am I?” It is a legal issue of citizenship.As
sovereign entities, tribes have laws that govern who is and isn’t Native. “Someone
who’s Italian doesn’t have to look a certain way or be a certain way,” Harjo
explains. “They are Italian by virtue of being an Italian citizen.The same is true in
Indian country.
“If I go to Italy and say, ‘I think the world of you people. I speak a little Italian, I love
spaghetti, so I’m going to be voting in your next election.Give me preference as
an Italian citizen as opposed to noncitizens.Give me a job. Give me grant money.
And maybe I’m going to carry on your diplomatic relations with other nations,’
people would lock me up. But that’s what happens.The people that step into our
world don’t do so in a respectful way.They rush right in and say ‘I’m your leader,
I’m the articulator of your culture.’?”
- Fleischer on comment from Native American rights activist
and Indian CountryToday columnist Suzan Shown Harjo in
Navahoax (Jan 2006, LAWeekly)

“Pretendians” and “Playing Indian”
“More than a half century before, Bostonians had dressed as Indians to leave
their colonial status behind and to define and then become Americans. […]
Despite the various manipulations of Indianness, however, these Indians (and
Indian Others) were not going away, and whiteAmerican identity quests
based on Indianness would confront the inevitable consequences of that
fact.”
Pg 69 – 70, Philip Deloria Playing Indian (1998)Yale University Press
Philip Deloria is an Enrolled Member of
Standing Rock Sioux

Controlling the Narrative
■ The Education of LittleTree (1976) by Forrest
Carter. A children’s book about a young orphan boy
learningCherokee wisdom from his grandparents.
■ This book was a NewYorkTimes Bestseller, and
widely available in classrooms and libraries as a
recommended read for children.
■ It was written by a Ku Klux Klansman named Asa
Earl Carter.

What Can Be
Done?
■ These are not new issues the friction between a library’s duty
to abstain from censoriousness via classification and
cataloguing processes is a very real one.
■ Karen Snow’s 2015 article, An Examination of the Practical and
Ethical Issues Surrounding False Memoirs in Cataloging Practice,
is recommended for a review of the literature on this subject,
and an excellent analysis of the history of metadata appended
toThe Education of LittleTree, in particular.
■ However none of the suggested and encouraged actions to
treat cataloguing as an ongoing ethical practice that can
require revisitation of original records, goes into specificity on
the specific type and degree of risk to Indigenous communities
co-opted into a writer’s attempt to ‘Play Indian’.
■ This is a specific branch of ‘false memoir’ rooted in a
behavioural pattern that causes ongoing harm to Indigenous
people.
■ What can be done about it?What should be done about it?
Nicole
Brandon
Fri
6
May
2022
for
ARLIS
UK

CASE STUDY 2 - Company, Crown and
Colony : the Hudson's Bay Company and
territorial endeavour in western Canada by
Stephen Royle (2011) Palgrave Macmillan
Nicole
Brandon
Fri
6
May
2022
for
ARLIS
UK

The point of interest here is that
the subject heading
metadata makes no mention
of even a broad category of
Indigenous Peoples when
catalogue users would
navigate by those tags.
Chapter 3 of the book explicitly
details the history of
relations between the
Company and the different
tribes of Indigenous peoples
onVancouver Island.

Held at a Distance
■ Accounts of Colonial activity – often through company enterprises like the Hudson
Trading Company – are a major research area for study of many Indigenous Peoples,
particularly those in Canada and the eastern half of the United States.
■ These accounts, often meticulously kept such as those consulted by Royle for
Company,Crown and Colony, can be used to discover the fates of individual people
and entire cultures.This information was habitually controlled, destroyed or removed
from access in the Americas – but it was retained in the colonizing force’s archives.
■ Colonial activity, by definition, engaged the colonized.These records are not just
valuable as bank statements and diaries of senior officials, etc.This is an extraordinary
wealth of information that, if approached with a variety of decolonizing research and
reading methods, can fill in our shared history from the multiple perspectives that
were a part of it.
■ This book is an example of how a different approach to cataloging could make our
Distant Institutions so much more accessible to Indigenous Peoples for whom it is
deeply significant, and could assist all researchers or readers in the project of re-
assembling and recapitulating our histories with an Indigenous perspective and
priority in focus.
Nicole
Brandon
Fri
6
May
2022
for
ARLIS
UK

What Can Be
Done?
■ Maintain awareness that this is a significant route for
researchers.
■ Be doubly aware that researchers are not only UK historians,
they include Indigenous peoples looking for information about
their own personal and community histories in one of the few
places where it has survived in a written form.
■ As art librarians, many of you are likely to hold collections that
include images of Indigenous Peoples which may be sensitive,
sacred or distressing in nature to encounter unawares.These
images may not be classified with this information available to
library users, or staff.
■ Work to maintain empathetic and accurate metadata for
collection items to enable their finding by those seeking them.
Consider warning tags where appropriate, and ensure these are
brought to the researcher’s attention immediately on
consulting a record for a collection item. Perform bibliographic
work to develop your institution’s understanding of your
collections so you can aid researchers, and build dialogue with
Indigenous communities and institutions to discuss relevant
collection items.
Nicole
Brandon
Fri
6
May
2022
for
ARLIS
UK

CASE STUDY 3 –Who WereThe First North
Americans (2007) by Philippa Wingate

“Indigenous
Disappearance” &
“Fictional Indians”
■ Indigenous Disappearance and Salvage
Anthropology
■ This isn’t the result of malice by the general
public, the justification for taking, keeping and re-
shaping a continent that was already inhabited by
other peoples became located in the idea of their
“inevitable extinction”, arguably a shift that
happened after settler populations could no
longer ascribe to the “extermination” strategies
that characterized Indigenous people as
dangerous and subhuman.

An EdinburghTale…
■ J.K. Rowling’s promotional writings about the
NorthAmerican wizarding culture of her fictional
Harry Potter universe began publication on her
Pottermore blog in 2016.
■ There were millions of hits on these pages and
enormous interest on social media, as well as
engagement by the author herself.
■ The page introducing her fictional version of
Indigenous magic systems is opposite.
Accessed on 9 March 2022: https://www.wizardingworld.com/writing-
by-jk-rowling/fourteenth-century-to-seventeenth-century-en

Response
■ “What happens when Rowling pulls this in, is we as Native people are now opened up
to a barrage of questions about these beliefs and traditions (take a look at my twitter
mentions if you don’t believe me)–but these are not things that need or should be
discussed by outsiders. At all. I’m sorry if that seems “unfair,” but that’s how our
cultures survive.”
– Adrienne Keene of Native Appropriations at
http://nativeappropriations.com/2016/03/magic-in-north-america-part-1-
ugh.html
Adrienne Keene is a member of the Cherokee
Nation

What Can Be
Done?
■ Work to increase awareness of materials
by and for Indigenous Peoples among
readership.
■ Don’t be afraid of complicated questions,
or incommensurabilities.
■ Remember Decolonization is Not A
Metaphor – you’re working towards
something
■ And that ‘something’ will enable your
libraries to do what they purported to do
from the start – really engage with the
full ranges of human knowledge that
exist… so long as they can have a home
in your library.
Nicole
Brandon
Fri
6
May
2022
for
ARLIS
UK

NMAI
SMITHSONIAN
,
WASHINGTON
D.C., USA

AMERICAN
PHILOSOPHICA
L SOCIETY

X̱wi7x̱wa Library,
University of British
Columbia
■ “Knowledge organization is fundamental to teaching,
learning, research and is deeply embedded in
organizational, political, social contexts of a particular
time and place, and within the global relations of those
dimensions: its possibilities enabled or constrained within
those contexts.” (p127)
■ Doyle,Ann M., Lawson, Kimberley & Dupont, Sarah
(2015) Indigenization of Knowledge Organization at the
X̱wi7x̱wa Library in Journal of Library and Information
Studies
Doyle (1st) no photo, no
info; Lawson (middle)
member of the Heiltsuk
Nation, Dupont (3rd)
Metis-settler heritage

THANKYOU
Nicole
Brandon
Fri
6
May
2022
for
ARLIS
UK

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