Following up on PACSCL’s successful National Native American Heritage Month event, please join us for the second part of our “Land Acknowledgments & Beyond” series on Tuesday 12/7 at 3pm Eastern. A series of lightning talks by archives, library, and museum professionals on initiatives they have participated in to strengthen connections with Indigenous communities and managing collections related to Indigenous peoples.

This event will be held over Zoom. Participants will be sent Zoom information separately.

Speakers include:

Allison Mills (Ililiw/Cree) is the College Archivist for Bryn Mawr College and previously worked at the University of British Columbia’s Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre.

Standard library cataloging practices do not accurately represent Indigenous peoples histories, cultures, and languages, usually classifying material related to Indigenous communities as historical. Allison Mills will discuss alternative cataloging methodology that pushes back against practices which perpetuate harmful stereotypes about Indigenous peoples.

Jim Gerencser has served as College Archivist at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA since 1998, and he has led numerous digital projects over his career, including the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, which was launched in 2013.

The Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center (https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/ ) brings together material from various repositories, sharing more than 300,000 pages of digitized documents, photographs, newspapers, financial ledgers, and other records. These materials, now more easily discoverable accessible, shed light on the experiences of the 7800 students who attended the Carlisle Indian School, as well as on the general operations of the school.

Jerry Simmons (he/him/his), National Archives and Records Administration External Agency Liaison to SNAC , as a project of NARA’s Office of Innovation, in cooperative leadership with the University of Virginia Library.

He plans to give a brief introduction to SNAC, explaining its cooperative approach to forefronting and sharing data about cultural heritage collections worldwide.

ᎠᏴ ᎢᏯ ᎪᎳᏄ ᏦᏓᎳᏁᎯ ᏩᎦᏧᎧᏅᏍᏕᎾ ᏓᏆᏙᎠ, ᏥᏄᏓᎴ ᏥᏎᎩᏳᏍᏗ ᏥᎦᏚᏩᎩ ᏥᎾᏥ: Ia Bull is a queer third gender archivist and scholar and a member of indigenous Gaduwagi and Natchez communities. Their pronouns are They/Them/Theirs.

They will assist Jerry and the other presenters in introducing SNAC and by providing insight as a contributor.

Rosalie Hooper (she/her) is the Interim Head of Interpretation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Rosalie will talk about the collaborative process used to develop both a land acknowledgment statement and the display of several pieces of Indigenous artwork in the newly opened early American art galleries at the PMA. She will also touch on how they are hoping to further develop these processes into a commitment to Indigenous communities held across the institution.

Brian Carpenter is Curator of Indigenous Materials at the American Philosophical Society Library & Museum.

Brian’s talk will share general observations on ways that archival institutions can make their collections accessible and usable in meaningful ways to Indigenous communities by strengthening the natural connection between reference and outreach, and developing clarity about what Native nations and researchers can ask of the institution.

Stephen R. Curley, MLIS (Diné/Navajo Nation) is the Director of Digital Archives at the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.T

he National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition hosts a Resource Database that contains historical documents from public and private institutions across the U.S. that shed light on Boarding School administration and experiences. Stephen will speak about the NABS Resource Database, what materials it includes, and how archives can contribute if they have in-scope documents.