 My name is Dr. Seth Importer, and I'm the Dean of the Kramer Family Library and Academic Online Lead at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. Today I'm going to be discussing with my colleague Dr. Ilahavi Tewawani, the Assistant Professor of Native American Indigenous Studies, as well as the inaugural Kramer Family Library Storytelling Professor, our attempts to decolonize academic research library's collections and programming through storytelling and digital preservation and celebration. The plan for today is to discuss the vision and foundation of this, the process and implementation, and how we're using storytelling to attempt to decolonize information, archives, as well as the content overall at academic research libraries. So what does this actually look like? Overall, the goal was to create, celebrate, preserve, and change as well as re-center live narratives and re-indigenize the collection as well as the academic research library at KFL and hopefully to diffuse this type of programming and efforts to other academic research libraries within the country. So one of the main goals here was to create a continuous process of decolonization within our content. And so how do we actually do this? Number one, I want to start this conversation with kind of just a quick note that decolonization as well as decolonizing information and knowledge doesn't belong to me. It is vital to me. It's something I care deeply about in libraries and the goal for me was to center and emphasize the folks who can do the work, who knows the work, and make sure they have the financial resources to do it. So it's really for me personally about re-centering others, who this is core to who they are, and making sure this content as well as this important work is done by the folks who quite frankly know what the hell they're doing. And my goal was to always just help create the framework and then hand it off to the best people and that's what we're doing. So the vision started kind of with a cooperative discussion with multiple stakeholders on campus, indigenous communities, and start looking into the literature. And from there, I personally took a lot of time working with one of our major donors to rework as well as get access to more funds so we could actually do this important work. So it kind of went from vision to donor management to fundraising development and relationship management across the board. Once we were able to create what the vision looks like, what we want, we didn't want it to be just paid by numbers and say this is what you're doing. The goal here was to create an overall goal, have a compass, and have the right people create the roadmap for us on how we're actually going to do this. And so once we were able to audit and work on our endowment processes, make sure we had the funds available, loosen it up so this could happen, we started also doing more fundraising across the board to have a better collection, be able to endow this position across the board and make sure it's a commitment from the institution moving forward. So following that, we created policy and procedures around, okay, how does this look, how is it going to work within the institution, working with the School of Liberal Arts on campus as well as a library to partner on this process to make sure it was kind of network managed across the board. So from there, we were able to endow the position and we started recruiting. Luckily, we had a world-class expert and somebody Dr. Ilahave Tuolani who is exactly who we needed to do this important work and she graciously accepted this and we're handing it off from there. So we recruited, we went from there, we had hiring support and then from there, me personally, I got the hell out of the way and handed it to the experts to do this important valuable work. And so one of the big terms that and one of the big ideas we wanted to get here, and this is kind of how I think about it as a continuous loop and how I think academic research library should and academic research library should think about it. So the deans, AULs, associate deans, I don't think unless you're a domain expert, you have the experience, you've lived it, you've studied this year, your entire life and it's part of Florida who you are and how you've lived should be doing the work. I think and this is what we're doing here is we're allocating substantial financial resources to the domain experts, the major stakeholders and the people who've actually lived this to do the work and create the framework themselves. So that's what we did number one. Second, we wanted to make sure we center and celebrate these domain experts, their lived experiences, their narratives and perspectives to make sure that we are re-centering and re-indigenizing our collections as well as our programming from their experiences. They're the people who are leading this. They're doing the work. We're just as a academic research library and the leadership, the office of the dean, are trying to create the infrastructure with them, co-create the infrastructure to make sure we can implement this and there's long-term programming and processes around it. Next, again, we just allocate financial resources on relevant resources to BIPOC and LGTBQI Plus as bookstores and vendors. So what we're doing in addition to the storytelling programming is not only are we saying, okay, we want to make sure we're celebrating this type of content, whether it's electronic resources, digital artifacts, anything in our archives, we're almost, we're trying to say, okay, not only are we doing that, we want to make sure we're going to the right vendors. So we're really emphasizing in our collection development, focusing on privately owned bookstores and privately owned vendors that are part of the community. And so this is a big part of what we're doing. It takes extra work and acquisitions, but we're not just giving this money to Wiley or Amazon and they're re-bringing it back into the huge conglomerates that they are. No, we're trying to not only celebrate this locally, but make sure it's a pipeline to the people who are doing the work so it's a continuous feedback process. Next, we just are creating bad-ass programming around this. And when we say me, I mean Dr. Ilahave and the DEI committee. And so mostly I'm just hyping it and making sure that we really have an opportunity to do some high-impact programming. So last, we are everything we're creating, whether it's storytelling contests, bringing in local Indigenous storytellers, we are going to create digital preservation and exhibitions around this, whether it's story maps, everything across the board, streaming, making sure this is preserved is well celebrated and accessible to the world at large. And so number one, what is our collection strategy around this? We are deliberately creating, and I'm going to have Ilahave talk about some of this here in a minute, and we are going to preserve and we're going to celebrate. So this is a use of ArcGIS and story maps, everything across the board to make sure that this content is visually appealing, but it's also preserved for the long run. And so what does this look like in action? And so why do we tell stories, right? We want to impart knowledge to relate to others and make someone laugh, share a memorable moment, and make the moment memorable to others. And so often in the past, the vast majority of academic research libraries have been western data, western American and European knowledge centers and ways of interacting with information. And the way we feel about it is, we think while that needs to be part of our collection, we need to re-center and celebrate these lost narratives and make it part of a continual improvement process. So for example, I'm going to stop here and let Dr. Ilahave tell an interesting story on how we do this, how we're doing it, and how we want to do this moving forward. I've got a story to tell you. I have a tool in it and I'm a inaugural Kramer family library storytelling professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. And I've got a story to tell you. This is a story that illustrates the value of oral storytelling. Heaps and heaps of ages ago, in my father's, the Ions of Tomah, they tell a story to little children to help feed their families. But this story, it stars an octopus, the feke, they call it, and a little rat. This rat, his ship was sinking, it was in the middle of the ocean. He could see Vava'u, an island far, far in the distance, but he knew that he'd never be able to reach it, not with his little tiny rat legs. He's drowning and suddenly a feke rises out of the ocean and brings the rat to the surface and makes a deal with the rat. The rat says, if you take me to Vava'u, I'll pay you when we get to the shore. Well, him being a rat, he knew he had no payment, not really. So he gets closer to the shore. He sees the shore. He knows that he'll be able to make it. And as a rat, he leaves a little something on the octopus's head just as he swam off to shore, a little number two right on the octopus's head. In fact, that is how the octopus gets its inky spots right on the head on his head. And the octopus feels his face. These are the number two that the rat left him and says, yells at him in the distance. My kind will hunt your kind for the rest of eternity. And in fact, the octopus still does. Right here, what we have is a maca feke, an octopus lure shaped like a rat. Anyone, any child could dangle this rat in front of the reef in the reef and the octopus will leave the safety of its reef home and wrap itself around this maca feke and not let go. Even when it's pulled out of the ocean, the person can just whack the octopus and there you fed your family. This is the value of oral storytelling. The child now knows why the feke hates the rat, the feke kills the rat, but also the child and in fact now you know how to catch a rock and octopus. This story is now in you. You have this story. If ever you are lost again, again, if you ever you are lost, trapped, marooned on an island, you can make a maca feke stone, shell, twine, rope, little tail and feed yourself. There is no empirical European knowledge that tells us why the feke hates the rat. It's only this story. This is the value of oral storytelling. When everything burns down, when the libraries burn, when the central database gets ruined by a flood, what else, how else are we going to impart our knowledge? Thank you for joining. I hope you never forget the story of the maca feke. That is just one example of the type of storytelling program we're trying to do and what Dr. Ilahava is doing across UCCS and for the Kramer Family Library is diffusing this type of re-indigenization and centering different forms of knowledge within the library and what we as the Kramer Family Library are trying to do is celebrate the work that she is doing and others that like her are doing and making sure we're preserving it for generations to come. This is a big goal of ours here at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs and the Kramer Family Library. What have we actually been doing? There's a few things. Number one, we every year have the per storytelling hour and this is an opportunity where we teach students and community members to tell stories. We will, in the future, as of next year and as we move forward in the spring, we'll be live streaming this, having all digital content as well as preserving the content moving forward for future generations. In addition to that, we will be having an annual Heller Center local storytelling feller. The Heller Center is a local humanity center on the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs campus. It's in the bluffs, it's a beautiful location, Santa Fe architecture and so we'll be bringing in a local storyteller, most likely from the Oop Mount New and we'll be setting them up as an artist in residency for a week coming out of the University of Colorado Springs Kramer Family Library Endowment and paying for them as well as a substantial stipend to live and create and we'll be preserving this content. In addition to that, they'll have a fireside chat where at the end of their fellowship, they'll actually have an opportunity to create stories and have people around an actual fireside and we'll be making sure we're documenting all this content for future generations and we'll be doing that year in year out. Moreover, we'll be starting to collect student storytelling exhibits, story maps and oral histories so we want to make sure we are preserving a lot of the local Oop Mount New and as well as Navajo stories from our greater community and preserving these moving forward whether it's a story map or oral storytelling across the board. Moreover, we'll be having library scavenging hunts and reimagining storytelling contests as we move forward and so a lot of this content will be about stories, about decolonization of information, diffusing this into the community, the research as well as the student lived experience. So Dr. Ilahave talks a lot about how we are decolonizing through collections so it's you know when we think about this a lot of what we talk about is what values do our collections in our archives as well as our general collection espouse so what do we consider collectible? What objects go to the library archive or museum archive? Who decides what is an artifact or a document? Whose voices are represented or muted because of this in an archive and so a lot of this work which Dr. Ilahave has worked on is you know it's inspired by the archival silences projects that's coming out of Princeton University where I used to work so a lot of this work is inspired by that and Dr. Ilahave actually worked on a lot of this process so we're trying to say what do we consider collectible and we're trying to kind of flip that script and say these stories, these narratives this needs to be preserved and centered along with the previous forms of empirical knowledge so the stories like Dr. Ilahave just mentioned this is incredibly important to us so the next steps for us we are just now hiring a digital curator and so they're going to preserve all storytelling through video digital learning objects, live streaming, any of the digital artifacts we are in addition to that going to create digital exhibitions and have an ongoing updated digital storytelling exhibition that is continually updated annually and going to be one of our prized exhibitions physically as well as digitally it's going to be something that we spend a lot of time resources and effort and Dr. Ilahave and the new digital curator will be focusing on those efforts so the goal here is again a consistent feedback loop from creation to preservation and celebration we want to make sure we have digital exhibitions, reflections of current programming, video online objects, oral histories, podcasts all of it across the board we're trying to create alignment with this type of effort and making sure it's not only preserved but we use the term celebrated it needs to be front and center across the board and we also want to curate all relevant community activities and content and again number last I keep saying it but preserve and celebrate so as we move forward here's our contact information we're always happy to talk about this these efforts again Dr. Seth Porter you know the library you see my email there Dr. Ilahave Tewani the real leader of this programming if you want to get into the weeds on this see what we can do she is a person of contact she is a point of the spear here and quite frankly it's been a real honor to work with her and learn from her and it's changed how I think about library research collections and how we build these moving forward and she's been an inspiration and it's changing the way we do work here at the Kramer family library so thank you for this it's been a pleasure to share this