Grant to support continued work of collaborative curation by WSU, partners, Native nations

The National Council on Library and Information Resources has awarded $334,000 to Washington State University, institutional partners, and nine Native American nations to extend their work advancing collaborative curation between Native communities and non-Native repositories.

The funding is part of CLIR’s “Digitizing Hidden Collections: Amplifying Unheard Voices” grant program for digitizing rare and unique content stewarded by collecting organizations in the United States and Canada. Launched in 2021, the program supports efforts to digitize materials that “deepen public understanding of the histories of people of color and other communities and populations whose work, experiences, and perspectives have been insufficiently recognized or unattended,” according to the CLIR website.

WSU participants in the project are the WSU Libraries’ Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation, and Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections.

Kim Christen, WSU associate vice chancellor for research advancement and partnerships, and Alex Merrill, head of WSU Libraries’ systems and technical operations, started the project in 2019 to reconnect Native communities with collections at WSU and other non-Native repositories. The project team is now digitizing the collections identified by tribal partners at multiple repositories and returning the content to them via the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal and the Native Northwest Portal (forthcoming).

Tribal representatives view each item to determine access levels (public/community only) and make metadata corrections. They also add their own community knowledge to the record, said Joelle Birano, one of the project’s organizers. The portal is updated with tribal feedback, and corrections are sent to staff at the repositories so they can update their collections.

“Our project is focused on digital repatriation to tribal nations,” Birano said. “The goal is for tribes to have increased access and control over their tribal knowledge and materials, even if they are distant from the physical collections, and for repositories to build trust with tribes and have more accurately described collections.”

One example of how the process works is represented by an undated image from MASC’s Historic Photograph Collection on the Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal. The Spokane Tribe record describes the photo as being likely taken at a public gathering or county event, pointing out the megaphone and modern band drum. The tribal partner also noted that the Native American men pictured were not chiefs, as indicated in the title.

“The CLIR grant is important to the Spokane Tribe because it affords the archives and collections staff the opportunity to discover more about our archival collection and build the knowledge base about the tribe’s historic past,” said Bobbi Rose, collections assistant for the Spokane Tribe Preservation Program. “It also is allowing our program to include our community, which is sparking a happiness within their hearts to remember our past ancestors. The enhanced records generated through the work completed under the CLIR grant aids in the overall preservation of the Spokane Tribe’s cultural resources that benefit current and future generations of tribal members.”

In addition to WSU, other participants in the CLIR-funded project include the American Philosophical Society; National Museum of the American Indian; University of Washington; and the Native American nations of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe (Idaho), Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation (Washington), Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (Montana), Spokane Tribe of Indians (Washington), Confederated Tribes of Warm Spring (Oregon), Nimíipuu (Nez Perce) Tribe (Idaho), Quinault Indian Nation (Washington), Snoqualmie Indian Tribe (Washington), and Yakama Nation (Washington).