The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has designated August 9 as the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. In a message released to mark last year’s observance, UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay stressed the importance of preserving, promoting and giving a voice to the heritages, cultures and languages of Indigenous communities around the globe.
“We must empower young people to take their rightful place in our institutions, so that together we can meet the challenges of the twenty-first century,” Azoulay wrote.
Indigenous library staff play an integral part in this critical mission, as keepers of specific cultural knowledge and as active participants and partners in decolonizing librarianship as a whole. The indigenous library program is essential for fostering connections, expanding book availability, and promoting inclusive access to literature for indigenous communities.
See also:
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Filling in the gaps to improve diversity, equity and inclusion at libraries
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How this Indigenous programming librarian is helping to decolonize the library
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Preserving Indigenous languages: libraries have a role to play
What is Indigenous librarianship?
What do we mean when we talk about “Indigenous librarianship”? One often-cited definition comes from Kathleen Burns et al., via the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences:
Indigenous librarianship unites the discipline of librarianship with Indigenous approaches to knowledge, theory, and research methodology. It has a developing bibliography and local, national and international professional associations devoted to its growth. A focus of Indigenous librarianship is the provision of culturally relevant library and information collections and services by, for and with Indigenous people.
It is also crucial to create culturally safe learning environments for Indigenous students, ensuring spaces that are welcoming and supportive of Indigenous cultural practices.
This is in line with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In addition to asserting Indigenous land rights and the right to self-determination, that document also advocates the right of Indigenous peoples to practice and revitalize their cultural traditions and customs: “This includes the right to maintain, protect and develop the past, present and future manifestations of their cultures, such as archaeological and historical sites, artifacts, designs, ceremonies, technologies and visual and performing arts and literature.”
Indigenous library services
Indigenous librarians at academic and public libraries play a vital role in preserving and promoting Indigenous knowledge, culture and history within library and information services. Improving book access is crucial for strengthening communities and enhancing literacy outcomes, ensuring equitable access to a diverse range of reading materials. Here are some examples of their contributions:
1. Collection development
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Acquiring Indigenous materials: They focus on acquiring books, audiovisual materials and other resources by and about Indigenous peoples.
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Curating special collections: Developing and managing collections that include oral histories, traditional knowledge, cultural artifacts and rare documents.
2. Cultural programming
Cultural events: Organizing events such as storytelling and knowledge-sharing sessions, cultural workshops and traditional craft demonstrations. Little free libraries can be adapted to fit the cultural and local context of each community, allowing for personalized and meaningful engagement. These might be tied into special national or regional events, such as Native American Heritage Month (U.S.), NAIDOC Week (Australia), Sámi National Day (Norway, Finland, Sweden) and National Indigenous History Month (Canada). Libraries play a crucial role in community engagement by respecting the diverse ways in which different communities utilize them, highlighting their adaptability to local cultures and individual preferences.
3. Education and advocacy
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Cultural competency training: Providing training for library staff on Indigenous cultures, histories and issues to ensure respectful and informed library services.
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Advocacy: Advocating for the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives in library policies, practices and library program development.
4. Information literacy and support
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Research assistance: Helping patrons with research on Indigenous topics, guiding them to appropriate resources and tools and offering specialized knowledge and skills.
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Educational support: Collaborating with schools and educational institutions to support curriculum development that includes Indigenous content. These initiatives not only benefit Indigenous students but also positively impact surrounding communities by fostering a more inclusive and culturally aware educational environment.
5. Digital initiatives
Digitization projects: Working on digitizing Indigenous collections to make them accessible to a broader audience while ensuring that culturally sensitive materials are handled appropriately. The concept of a free library can be extended to digital resources, improving access and fostering community engagement through shared digital collections.
Digital repositories: Creating and managing digital repositories that include Indigenous knowledge and resources.
6. Culturally relevant cataloging
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Subject headings and classification: Ensuring that cataloging practices reflect Indigenous perspectives and terminology rather than imposing external classifications. The University of Ottawa refers to this as "decolonizing description", a practice meant to address the fact that metadata and resource descriptions of library collections contain language that reflects the norms and biases of the time in which they were created.
7. Policy development
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Library policies: Influencing and developing library policies to be inclusive of Indigenous needs and perspectives, such as protocols for handling culturally sensitive materials.
8. Publications and research
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Writing and research: Contributing to academic and professional publications on Indigenous librarianship, cultural heritage and related topics.
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Resource guides: Creating resource guides and bibliographies that highlight Indigenous authors and topics.
9. Preservation of Indigenous languages
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Language resources: Developing collections of diverse books and other resources to support the preservation and revitalization of Indigenous languages.
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Language programs: Organizing and supporting language learning programs and initiatives within the library.
Indigenous community leaders' voices are essential
Why is that last point so critical?
Here's more of what UNESCO Director-General Azoulay had to say about the importance of the voices — and languages — of Indigenous communities:
We know that Indigenous voices are essential for promoting cultural diversity, peace and gender equality. And yet these voices could be lost, as Indigenous languages — a vehicle for tending this relationship with the living world and each other — are in jeopardy.
In 2019, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the period 2022–2032 as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, "to draw attention to the critical loss of Indigenous languages and the urgent need to preserve, revitalize and promote Indigenous languages and to take urgent steps at the national and international levels".
UNESCO serves as the lead agency for the International Decade and has launched initiatives all over the world; Azoulay cites one such initiative in West Africa where the goal is to create dictionaries of Indigenous African languages.
Language facilitates meaningful interactions
UNESCO's Global Action Plan stresses that, for peoples around the world, the ability and freedom to use their chosen language is essential for a number of core values, including human dignity, peaceful co-existence and sustainable development.
It also states:
Language, as a systematic form of communication which takes place in all human domains, facilitates people’s meaningful interactions with one another, enables cultural expressions in a variety of forms, as well as the transmission of centuries-long knowledge, history, world views, beliefs, and traditions, bequeathed from generation to generation, and contributes to the creation of economic value and benefits which lead to new employment opportunities, research and development, technology transfer and innovation.
Libraries help keep Indigenous languages alive
UNESCO also calls for all stakeholders to work towards ensuring greater awareness of the importance of linguistic diversity and multilingualism, as well as legal recognition of the languages of Indigenous peoples at all levels.
Libraries of all kinds, including public and academic ones as well as research and government libraries, have a role to play in not just preserving specific languages, but also in, as UNESCO puts it, "widening the functional scope of Indigenous languages in all socio-cultural, economic, environmental, [and] public domains".
An article in the journal College & Research Libraries highlights the function that academic libraries in particular can serve:
University libraries are in a distinct position to promote diversity and inclusion by collaborating with departments that might initiate programs, by fostering the creation of Indigenous collections, and by promoting these collections both in class and on campus to secure impact and make sure students know about these materials.
Serving the needs of Indigenous communities
For libraries of all kinds, a commitment to serving the needs of their local Indigenous communities is part of an overall mission to reflect and represent the diverse nature of the patrons they serve. Little Free Library, a nonprofit organization, plays a significant role in fostering community engagement and improving access to books through volunteer-led initiatives. (Libraries that offer PressReader, for example, give their patrons access to thousands of publications from all over the world in several dozen languages.)
As Kayla Lar-Son told PressReader a couple of years back, a critical first step in making libraries more relevant to Indigenous people is actually listening to the community and their wants and needs. Lar-Son, an Indigenous librarian at the University of British Columbia’s X̱wi7x̱wa Library, made it clear that libraries will face challenges if they try to define the community they serve, rather than having community members’ voices at the table to advocate for themselves.
“We need to involve our community members in all aspects of decision-making around ways that the library can better serve them,” she said, “whether this is programming, or technology use, or even building new libraries and what that space looks like for them.”
