As a Northern Sierra Miwok woman, my entry into libraries and archives began with and is rooted in my love of storytelling.

I grew up hearing my tribal creation stories and oral histories from my Great Grandmother’s lips, and was privileged to have a mother that designed and taught lessons to my elementary school classes that represented the perspectives and histories of my people in the face of stereotypes and misinformation. Bearing witness to and learning these practices taught me of the importance our stories hold as both grounding forces and tools for educating non-Indigenous peoples. Whether through fiction writing, digital humanities projects, archival research or small-scale library exhibitions, I incorporate storytelling and narrative-weaving into all aspects of my work as a means of honoring the voices and stories of those who came before me. With these passions in mind, my summer at the Phillips Library as a Summer 2024 Fellow in PEM’s Native American Fellowship (NAF) program centered on telling more holistic and representative stories of Native peoples through acquiring new texts for the collections.

My primary project of the summer focused on contextualizing the Native art in On This Ground: Being and Belonging In America, an exhibition that seeks to reframe and redefine “American” and Native American history while grappling with questions of belonging and community in the United States. My summer project aimed to create cohesion and conversation between the Phillips Library’s Native American materials and the Peabody Essex Museum’s Native American art collection through identifying and acquiring relevant Native-authored and Native-centered publications. To achieve this goal, I first evaluated On This Ground to identify communities, themes and values represented through the art and belongings on display.

Collaborative in nature, this evaluation process included multiple guided tours of the installation with PEM Visitor Engagement staff and curators, who provided integral insight into the creation of the exhibition. Karen Kramer, PEM’s Stuart W. and Elizabeth F. Pratt Curator of Native American and Oceanic Art and Culture and NAF Program Director, provided especially valuable knowledge and information about the objects through a spreadsheet that I utilized to track key names, communities and places. After gathering this information, I compared my findings to the available print and manuscript resources in the Phillips Library to determine gaps in representation.

This comparison revealed that in order to properly contextualize the communities, belongings and events represented in On This Ground, I needed to acquire print materials that were authored by Native peoples, as well as those by non-Native peoples working in close collaboration with Native communities.

I identified Birchbark Books, A Tribe Called Geek Books and Comics and Native Books Hawai’i as primary Indigenous-owned online book vendors. For me, this was an incredibly important aspect of the project because the ways in which an institution spends its money is indicative of its values. By acquiring materials from Native-owned businesses, the Phillips Library is able to actively demonstrate one aspect of its commitment to serving Native and Indigenous peoples and centering our knowledges.

More specifically, the library’s policy states: "Native American and Oceanic Art and Culture — works about the art and culture of Indigenous people from lands now under the jurisdiction of the United States and Canada — are collected extensively. While the library is relatively strong in 19th- and 20th-century ethnology, anthropology and archaeology due to past practice, we are de-emphasizing these subject areas favor of focusing on contemporary Indigenous art/artists, exhibition catalogs, cultural studies and other scholarly works by and/or about Indigenous peoples and creators. As much as possible, we will acquire materials directly from Indigenous artists and/or Indigenous-owned businesses like publishers and bookstores."

The result of this list is a collection of approximately 70 new acquisitions to the Phillips Library collection, each selected in connection with specific Indigenous artists and the communities they represent and belong to. Representing a breadth of genres, subject matters and Nations, this list includes graphic novels, memoirs, speculative fiction and nonfiction materials that offer insight into Native environmental activism, social justice activism, cultural revitalization, traditional artistic practices and traditional storytelling practices. By offering a rich diversity of Native perspectives across disciplines and areas of study, users and curators alike may better contextualize and understand the Native artworks in On This Ground, which similarly span genre, themes, subject matter, place and time.

For example, Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream by Greg Sarris (which holds deep personal importance for me as a California Native woman) offers unique context for understanding the cultural significance of Pomo basketweaving practices and baskets within the collection from a Pomo perspective. This text also introduces readers to Mabel McKay, renowned Pomo weaver, culture bearer and dreamer. By acquiring this text, the library offers visitors the chance to build connections between baskets in the collections and the people who weave them. In this way, visitors may better understand baskets as not only beautiful and intricate pieces of art, but also deeply significant representations of Native resilience and survivance — a term developed by scholar Gerald Vizenor (White Earth Anishinaabe) to describe the active, ongoing presence and resistance of Native people in the face of settler colonialism and cultural erasure.