 Good morning everybody. It's me again. Hi, hi, I'm Jolie Graybill. I'm assistant director at Minutex which is a division of the University of Minnesota Libraries. I've been with Minutex in the University Libraries for about three and a half years and it is my pleasure to introduce a fellow native Matei speaker to you all this morning, Jesse Lawyer. Jesse is Cree Matei and a member of the Michelle First Nation. She is a liaison librarian at Mount Royal University in Calgary, a guest on Treaty 7 in Blackfoot territory, and her research looks at Indigenous perspectives on information literacy, supporting language revitalization, and creating ongoing research relationships using a Cree and Matei concept of kinship. So please join me in welcoming Jesse this morning. My name is Jesse Lawyer. I am a member of Michelle First Nation. Located in Northern Alberta. I grew up in Calahoo but I live in Calgary now and I'm a librarian at Mount Royal University. And so what we're gonna be doing today is really kind of taking a very practical approach to considering Indigenous communities that we need to be responsible for and accountable to in the places where we work. So I'm gonna just take a second and pull up my notes. So this is a series of guided questions. So you have internet access. You might have some pens in front of you. You're gonna be thinking about your own positionality through this process, thinking about the places where you live and work, and the answers to those, the questions that I'll be posing are obviously gonna be different based on where you are. So this is thinking about our own implicate, the implications of our presence on Indigenous land. And so I'm very grateful to be here in Dakota land where there are many other Ojibwe people as well. To be welcomed in here, to be an uninvited guest here, that's an important component of that too. And so thinking about my own implication in this space is the starting point for our discussion as well. So we, there's a real tendency to position Indigenous communities as only historical, only rural, only poor, and only reservation communities. Those are obviously still part of the conversation, but they're not the only communities of indigeneity that libraries need to think about and be aware of. So we'll be thinking about the territories in which we live and work. We're gonna be thinking about the local relationships and resources and how often and at what level Indigenous folks are engaged in planning and decision-making in our universities and in our libraries. So the reason we start with land is that from a Nihio perspective, land is foundational. Everything starts with land. So Indigenous legal systems are often based in the places where they started, right? And so land isn't just sort of this abstract concept, but it is part of the Indigenous legal system that we're engaging with. And so Uski, which is land in Cree, deals with this positioning that we have, but it also tells us about our relationships. So it tells us about kind of who we are responsible for. And that's kinship in the broadest sense. We're not just talking about our own family units and anthropological sense of that, but kinship in a broadest sense, non-human kin, kin to the land. What does our responsibilities look like here? The reason it's undergrading our discussion today as well is that everything that the universities do is based on land. So the fact of where we are physically located is based on resources, right? The fact of the cities building up around this place comes from people who, from former gathering places, right? There is a history of land that undergrids everything. We can also think about the way that our universities deal with resource management, right? Are we accepting money from resource extraction companies? That's also a component of the work that we do. So that's why it's kind of at the basis of this discussion today. When non-indigenous people engage with indigeneity, it often falls into two kind of specific categories. And one of them was mentioned earlier in the question to the keynote, and that is in crisis. So we often see indigeneity only coming up as a reactionary discussion, right? So something happens. There's maybe a racist attack or the discussion about sports mascots comes up or Halloween exists. And then all of a sudden we talk about things like cultural appropriation and we talk about indigenous perspectives on things, but it's often an outrage, right? So we, indigeneity comes up as a component of outrage as opposed to something that is natural and woven into our discussions of diversity. The other side of it is as an abstract sense of indigeneity. So some people don't know any native folks. And that's fine, right? We all have different kind of categories of friends that we fall into. But the removal of indigeneity in North America is something that is kind of a persistent myth. And so this idea that there are basically no native people to talk about is a really persistent thing that comes up when we discuss kind of different communities that we need to be thinking about. Another element of that is also the environmental Indian as an example, right? So the environmental movement invoking this idea of indigenous people who belong in nature, who are really tied to that. And I want I want to really think about the two ways that I've presented it. So land is a foundational concept. It's a foundational concept of the Nehio legal system. But that doesn't mean that every single Cree person is like a tree hugger, right? People work in all kinds of, you know, roles and they have their own individual beliefs about stuff. And so that trope of kind of an imaginary Indian, a disappearing Indian and environmental Indian, these are tropes that are employed without actually positioning real contemporary lived realities. And so what we want to do is kind of get in front of those two kind of reactions to indigeneity. So we want to get in front of sort of the reactionary sort of outrage. And we want to get in front of sort of a weird mystical nostalgic idea of indigeneity. And we want to think really practically about who's living where we live, right? Who do we serve? Or whom more often we are not serving very well. So you're not going to know the questions to all these, or you're not going to know the answers to all these questions. And that's completely fine. And that's part of the process, right? Hopefully you can take these home and actually prompt yourself to go and find these communities that you might not know about. It's also important to note that this isn't going to stay the same, right? So this is an ongoing process. And we see that a little bit in the anxiety around, what do we call Indigenous people? And that's fine, right? We know that that the terminology is going to change, it has changed, and it will continue to change. And being okay with that flexibility, having that flexibility and listening to the communities, what are they saying is really going to be at the core of what we're talking about. So there's going to be people that feel more comfortable with Indians, right? And I have in my wallet right now, a certificate of Indian status from the government of Canada. And that's a legal term in Canada that is completely valid, right? People can talk about how that's a problematic term. Absolutely. I'm going to think about Indians of North America as a Library of Congress, classification, subject heading. And so we really need to think about, you know, these are complicated things and there's layers and layers around this terminology. We think about Native American, Amerindian, we can think about First Nations, Aboriginal, all of these are choices that are made that have layers and layers of politics behind them and layers and layers of history. And it's okay that they might change. So we'll just take a breath. We'll just let that one go right now. So you'll find that I'm moving in and out of a number of these, these terms as we go through it. So in Canada right now, we're in a moment that is characterized by the TRC, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And this is looking right now at, or had looked at kind of the traumas and realities of the Indian residential school system where children, Indigenous children were taken from their communities and put in church and state-run schools, basically as a form of cultural genocide. As well as cultural genocide, many children did not come back and many schools had graveyards instead of playgrounds in their areas. And so this is a kind of a, we're dealing with this space after the TRC has closed, there's a report that has existed. And so the term reconciliation is being thrown around quite a lot in Canada right now. And this is interesting too, because there's lots of acts of reconciliation that people are doing. And it can be as simple as something like a land acknowledgement, something that we had today, right? Just thinking about, okay, where are we? Who are we? Who has enabled us to be here? But there's also things like, you know, like, plant a flower garden where you read a message to the children that never came back, which is also, you know, useful. But at the core of it, many Indigenous people are saying, real reconciliation is giving back the land. Like, if we really want to talk about this, let's get down to breast tax. Your acts of reconciliation, your ways of educating yourselves is important. But at the core of this is land. And so that's again what undergirds us, right? This context is often taking kind of weirdly abstract, but we're thinking about, okay, how do we get back to the land that sustains us? Or how do we think about that as something that undergirds the entire understanding of indigeneity in North America? So a bit of an industry has developed around this, right? We see certain kind of celebrities that are tied to concepts of reconciliation. But what we really need to do is take ourselves out of that sort of celebrity mindset and think through indigenous legal systems as our basis of understanding. So what we're going to do right now is think about positioning ourselves. And so this is thinking about, I'm less interested in kind of the First Nations or Aboriginal 101. And I'm interested in your own relationship to the places that you're in, because I think resentment comes up quick when somebody is like, oh, I have to listen to these things I learned in social studies. I'm not interested in that at all. I'm interested in you thinking, okay, here I am as this person, maybe I'm an indigenous person, maybe I'm not indigenous. Maybe I live in the territory where my ancestors are from. Maybe my family has been here for centuries. Maybe my ancestors were brought here as slaves. What is my relationship to the place that I'm in, right? What am I connected to here? I hope you're a new Canadian or a new American. What does that mean for somebody that maybe has just been here for a couple of years? So that's what I think I want us to do. I want us to not think about necessarily just the historical things around where we live and work, but more importantly, who we are in those places. So my name is Jesse Lawyer. I'm the daughter of Selena and Darryl Lawyer. My maternal grandparents are the late Kathleen Steinhauer from Saddle Lake Cree Nation and the late Gilbert Anderson from Michelle First Nation. My maternal grandmother is Lorraine Savard Amity Mitriak from Calahou. Her mother was Clara Cunningham, a Muskegisque, a medicine woman who's located in that place. These are the people who have kind of created me to be in this space. I'm on Twitter. You can come find me if you want. I work at Monterey University in Calgary and I'm really deliberate about positioning myself as an Indigenous person, but in not my own territory. And so actually Blackfoot and Cree people were historically enemies. So I live and work in my enemy's territory. But I think that it's useful for us to think through that too. We often think of Indigenousity as being basically non or on, right? But we're actually thinking about it as everything is complicated, right? Even if you are a Blackfoot person in Calgary, that's a different sort of space than your ancestors were engaged in. So that's the first thing that I want you to kind of do is think through who are you? Where are you from? Who are the people that you're from? And where are you now? So are you in the place that you kind of originally intended to be? So I'll give you a couple of minutes to just kind of jot that down or think about that as well. So we're going to move into kind of the positioning of where these questions are coming from. And so we start with this assertion that libraries must be in good relationship with Indigenous communities. That's what we're striving for is good relationship. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about what our guiding framework will be, but it's fundamental core asks the question, who are you responsible for and accountable to? So thinking about positioning ourselves not only as people who come from a history, who our families are, and who our originating communities are, and as well as the communities that we exist in. But what are those networks that exist in those places? And so that's the questions that we're kind of moving into now. And so our framework today is actually a part of a free legal system. It's a lot of what go to it, which is it's about relationality. So understanding the way that people understand your own kinship networks, knowing what those are, knowing who your relatives are and knowing what your responsibilities to them are. So I might have a different responsibility to someone who is my grandmother versus my aunt, right? So in Korea, for example, my grand, my mom's sisters, she doesn't have any, but if she had any, they would be my mother's. And so my mom has several mothers, her late mother had two three other sisters. And so we're very close with that side of the family because of those kinship networks. We also want to think about what we're doing is not just simply an anthropological sense of kinship, right? So those, you know, cross cousins, and we've seen some of those charts if you've taken any anthro classes. But we want to think about it as well as something that extends beyond the family unit. It's centered in the family unit, but it extends into trade networks, it sends into business, it extends into extended family. So those communities of kinship extend beyond just kind of our sense of who our own cousins are. And we'll go to and also ask us to think about that ethic of care, right? So who are we taking care of as part of this process, right? And who's taking care of us, right? That reciprocal nature of all of these different relationships. All right. So what we're going to do now is start to have these questions. I'll leave them up for all. I'll put them up on the board and I'll get you to write them down. We're going to work through the different questions. We're going to take a break. I'm going to get you to come up and answer some of these questions. I'm going to maybe kind of go through them again and get you to see, do you know the answer to them? If you don't, kind of where did that come from? What are you going to take away? What are you going to do that? We're going to come back. I'm going to ask you three more questions that also help to center sort of where do we go from here now that we've identified communities? And then we're going to wrap up. So that's kind of the process of what we're looking at. So we're starting at the university itself. And so the question is, is there an Indigenous student center or organization in your university? And this centers around our academic spaces. So at Mount Royal University, the Aniscom Center is a student space that was created to deal with student success. So they include things like writing help. Someone comes in from the writing center. I go and have office hours there. They deal with scholarships, housing, that sort of thing. Those are for those communities. And so we're really trying to do this to center Indigenous students that are in our spaces, right? Do they have a place where they can go? And is that a place where you can be as well? And so also part of that is where does this live? Is it part of maybe student affairs and campus life? Because that's where it is at Mount Royal. Is it maybe part of the student union? There might be a student, an Indigenous student government that could be the existing as well. Is it on the academic side of the house or do you have something similar on the academic side of the house? These are all questions that I think are really helpful for us to center Indigenous students. You might have no Indigenous students in your university. And if that's the case, what happens when one comes? How do you take care of them? All right, our next question kind of takes us to a different level. Are there any Indigenous administrators? And so we're moving up kind of in who has the power to make change at this point. And so these are people who are kind of at the level to make change. They might be AVPs. In Canada, there's a lot of positions that are now focusing around the concept of indigenization. So bringing in Indigenous worldviews into the institution. And these are people that often advise the provost and the vice president or the provost and the president on these issues. So they might be people who have maybe worked in other industries. They may not be academics themselves, but they're helping with the kind of the advising side of it. There's also Indigenous elders that might be a component of this. And so in Canada, this land acknowledgement has become very common and often delivered by an elder from the territory where the university is located. So invited in from maybe a reserve that's close by. And so where are they in that decision-making process? This is another good question to think about what these people are actually asked to do, right? So is it a waste of someone's knowledge, essentially a PhD in another format, an elder in this way? Is it a waste of their knowledge to have them come in and do Atlantic acknowledgement and a prayer when they could be teaching or they could be doing that work? And so it's also thinking about how the administration is using Indigenous bodies kind of as a token sometimes, but then how can we make it into something that's a little bit more, you know, usable for us? Now let's take it back to our own libraries. So do you have library staff positions relating to Indigenous concerns? So note that I don't ask if you have library staff who are Indigenous, because they're allowed to be catalogers and they're allowed to do other things, you know, like if someone's a great cataloger, I will happily let them do that because it is not my jam. So they're welcome to go catalog all they want. But we're thinking about the positions, right? And so how are these funded, right? Are these one-year terms? Is it trial and error kind of thing? Is it a tenure-track position in your area? Who deals with Indigenous concerns? Is it rolled into another area, right? Is it just another liaison area? Who's dealing with Indigenous concerns from the library perspective? Who's bringing, who's kind of collecting that information and bringing it back to the library to say, hey, we have this group of students, or we have these issues, or we have these gaps in our curriculum to deal with Indigenous concerns. So where is that located in your library? Does it exist as a librarian position? Does it exist as a staff position? Is it faculty? Who knows about this stuff in your place? And if that's not the case, why? So it's another big question too. Why don't you have something that exists like that? So we're seeing that in a variety of different spots. If you have an Indigenous studies or a Native American studies program, whoever the liaison librarian is that deals with that, how are they kind of connected, right? And how do they get that information out to the rest of the library too? There's a good example of this in Calgary Public Library, where recently they realized that they wanted a design lead that knew about Indigenous issues. So they hired one design lead kind of on that team to kind of think about how do we deal with, how do we design programming around this? That person was in there for a year and then three additional positions came out of that as well because they realized that one single person cannot deal with all of this stuff, right? You cannot put on one single person kind of the weight of an entire community, right? They have to liaise with a variety of different communities, deal with elders, bring in programming and sure things are authentic is a long process to deal with. So now they have additional staff, three additional positions that help with that. And it's important to note that those people, those three, well actually all four of them, are not library people. They don't have diplomas, they don't have degrees, they don't have an MLAS. So those are people who are community leaders, they're involved, they're activists, they've been involved in lots of other events around the city, but they are not library people. And so let's think also about credentialing. So what does it mean to ask for an MLAS or what does it mean to ask for a library tech diploma? Because that will mean that certain communities are not included in that space at all either. The other component of this too is thinking about that staff position with flexibility. And so I was honored to act as one of the references for one of those people that was hired. And I mentioned that you have hired a community leader, which is fantastic for the library, but you need to give that person flexibility to remain a community leader. So can they still go to stuff in the middle of the day as an example? What are their hours like? How are they able to work this in? And so it's not very useful in terms of retention, if you've gone on an amazing person that's involved in community activism, and then they aren't allowed to do the community activism that you kind of wanted them on your team for. So that's a whole realm of things to think about around kind of the staff, the hiring side of thinking about whose responsibility is it for Indigenous concerns. So now we're going to take a step out of the university and we're going to look at the cities that we kind of exist in. So I want you to write down the city that your library is in. And then I want you to do a little bit of research and look up what else that place might be called. So I'm going to just be quiet for a little while and I'm going to have people look that up. So these are, we're looking at kind of the historical side of things and the names in Indigenous languages. What do Indigenous people call the places where we're in? So you know that I don't say what else were these cities called, but I'm using contemporary language, right? What are these places called? That's kind of getting back to that idea that we're not positioning Native people as being historical, right? That there are contemporary lived realities of Indigenous people in this city that we're in right now. And in every city that we're in, Indigenous reality is something we need to think about and as well as thinking about our future, right? And so avoid the trap of kind of, you know, the nostalgic history placing for Indigenous people, right? It's so satisfying in some ways to think about it being a dying culture that, you know, it's so sad, but that's not the reality, you know, that's not, that's not the reality. So in Calgary, Calgary is known basically by the same word in multiple Indigenous languages. So in Blackfoot, it's Mokistus, in Cree, it's Otuskonek. And in both of those cases, as well as the two other, two other languages, it's saying Calgary is called At the Elbow. And so Calgary is a place where the Bow River meets the Elbow River. And that place where those two rivers meet is actually a really important place in Blackfoot cosmology because it's considered the place of creation. Creation starts there. And so in Calgary, and in all of your spaces, we have a place that's defined by ways beyond Western categorization. We have a language to talk about this as a gathering place that doesn't start when Calgary gets incorporated. And so the realities of that place, these gathering places have much longer histories than we're used to thinking about. We have to start thinking of our cities as places that didn't start with the railroad or the fur trade or with Western industry. But consider them as places with much longer histories and varied realities. So Blackfoot people will think about Calgary very differently than Kree people will, differently than Nakoda people will, differently than Sitana people will. All of those people that kind of come through this space. So we like to think about it in ways that it's understood in different, from different perspectives than the ways that we normally kind of think about it. And we want to kind of get out of the, also the trap of having kind of white man names associated with things, right? So is your city named after a white dude? He has not been there forever, right? And so think about the people that have been there before this white dude kind of came through. All right. So the next question that I have for you is what treaties are you party to? So what treaties define this space is where you live and work? So I'm going to give you a little bit of a pause. Think about this. This is another nice kind of historical moment where you can kind of look into it and see, all right, who, who has defined this space is where we live and work. I'll come back in a, in a couple seconds. So this question asks you to position yourself as existing in a place because of work that has already happened, right? Many of us can't live and work in the places that we do without treaties that have already kind of happened. So Calgary is located in Treaty 7 territory. Without that agreement, I can't be a guest in that space. And so that's an essential thing that enables Calgary as a city to be there. The signatories to Treaty 7 were with the British Crown and then a number of Blackfoot groups, so Sixigah, Bikoni and Gheina, as well as three, the three different bands of Eahena Kota people, so Fairspot, Chinkee and Wesley and then the Tsutana people who are at the Treaty signing rate themselves in SRC. And so those are people who kind of thought about how this place is going to be organized and how do we think about it. We also like to think often about treaties as existing only between kind of the Crown or the government and Indigenous people. We can also think about treaties that exist between Indigenous nations. So a good example of that is Witaskwin, which is a treaty between the Nehioplat, so the Iron Confederacy and the Blackfoot Confederacy that kind of puts a boundary in Alberta, the province that I live in, of where people are supposed to go. So positions aren't kind of in that particular place. There's a town called Wataskwin now that kind of talks with this. And Witaskwin means Hills of Peace, right? It's positioning that treaty in that particular place. What this also does is helps us think through treaties as living ongoing documents, as living ongoing legal systems that can help organize our actions. We often think about treaties as kind of this sad, broken element of the past. But the way treaties are and the way that they were created and the way that Indigenous nations often consider treaties differently than kind of the government might is in ways to still inform our kinship relationships right now. And so the next question that I ask are, what are your treaty rights? So Indigenous people, and this is a good question for non-Indigenous people, because I as an Indigenous person know my treaty rights very well. But you also have treaty rights as a non-Indigenous person. And so one of my ancestors, Michelle Calle, who signed Treaty Six, which is the northern part of Alberta and goes across several provinces. And so that includes things like I get a $5 treaty annuity payment, not adjusted for inflation. The right to health care, which is associated with the medicine chess clause, which stated that a medicine chess would live at the home of every Indian agent. And that has been interpreted by Indigenous nations to mean that the government will provide health care. The government sees it in a very different way. And so they provide health care because they believe that it's helping to raise the health profile of Indigenous people in Canada to the rest of Canada. But what are your treaty rights as a non-Indigenous person? This is an important kind of shift to think of yourselves as being an active person involved in this process. That it isn't just something that exists with Indigenous people. But oftentimes, and have a look at the treaties that structure the places where you're from, but oftentimes it means that you won't get killed. Like, Indians aren't going to kill you. And that's a great treaty right to have. I think we'll all agree. But what this means is, yeah, that you see yourself as well as an inheritor of these treaties because there's likely multiple ones that have been created. All right, so now let's think about the spaces around the cities where we're in. So what reservations or reserves or settlements are close to your library or city? And so think about this a little bit. What places exist in the places where you are? What are the places of Indigenous gathering? Things to consider. What are federally recognized tribes? What are non-fedrally recognized tribes? In Canada, Métis settlements, Métis towns as another component of that. At the beginning, I talked about being Cree and Métis. And what I'm telling you there is not necessarily like my biological makeup. I'm like, not half this and half this. I'm telling you what are my kinship networks? Who am I responsible for? So if I say something stupid up here, who's going to call me out for that? Cree people and Métis people will. And so think about kind of these places not just as physical locations, but as sites of sovereignty. And so that's why we kind of identify these reservations that are kind of around where we are. There's also the issue of landless bands and movement. So we have places, people who exist in one spot and then were maybe moved or chose to move, but often were moved by government. And so this is another component to thinking about those communities that we can be aware of and be thinking about. Soutana as a good example. So Mount Royal University is located in southwest Calgary. And Soutana is a reserve that literally touches Calgary. Like it's smack dab against it. And so what does it mean to also be in an urban space that is a reservation, right, that is right up against it? You might be in a more rural place, right? And so that might look very different too. And the economic realities of one reserve versus another or one gathering place or one settlement versus another are very real, right? So kind of having them all with a broad brush, painting them all with a broad brush, is not going to work, right? Each community is going to have its own unique circumstances that we can consider. Now this is what we often think about indigenous ideas, right? People are on a reservation. They're off kind of in a rural space. But what I want us to think about now in our next question is what an urban indigenous community is around your city? And this is harder, right? This is definitely a more challenging question. And it requires engagement. Because we might have a chairman of a tribe that we can kind of go to, right? We think of them as like a, you know, we have a clear sense of who's running things on a reservation. In Canada, we have a chief in council, right, that are associated with different reserves. Urban indigenous communities, it's harder to place who to talk to here. And that's OK, right? But how do we kind of get to do this engagement to see if we're actually connecting to the people that we need to? It's a challenge and it takes time. That's the hardest thing about it. The other thing that considering urban indigenous communities, this is the other component of it is that it really challenges our nostalgic conception of indigenous people as like who's authentic, right? So an authentic Indian comes from a reservation. There's that sense in a lot of discussions. But there are many urban Aboriginal people who live authentic indigenous lives. And those are people who are using our spaces as well. That also kind of gets to what I was talking about before the environmental Indian idea, right? That only real Indians are connected to nature. And you know, you can the Pocahontas style thing. And we want to avoid that. Erica Violet-Lee is a Cree philosopher and poet who lives in Canada. And she talks about medicines in the city. And I'm just going to read a little section of it. She talks about deserving to know our laws, lands, and medicines. And she said, we deserve to know our medicines and our laws, but this place is not any utopia. So we grow our medicines from the cracks and concrete sidewalks and in between railroad tracks. We have to dig our laws out from underneath gravel logging roads and tend to our roads in contaminated fields. So considering indigeneity in the city is a component of this as well. The next thing we're going to do is talk about intersectionality. So what two-spirit and queer indigenous organizations are in your city? So we can think about, OK, who are our urban indigenous communities? But then those get broken up as well into smaller communities, right, with very different concerns from each other. Queerness isn't a very important component to consider when we talk about indigeneity. There's a great book called When did Indians become straight? And a lot of times, considering indigeneity through a very harsh binary is not only historically accurate, but it's also very damaging to queer indigenous youth. It's killing them. And so we need to think about where indigenous youth, especially queer and two-spirit ones, where do they fit into these ceremonies, right? And so a good example of this is for many ceremonies, skirts are something that is encouraged for women. And skirt shaming has become a little bit of a thing that sometimes exists, right, where someone will say, well, you can't commit if you're not wearing a skirt. But for a queer indigenous youth that doesn't identify in that way, this can literally mean the difference between life or death. And so we're talking about kind of helping people be connected to who they are, but also being aware that, you know, as our current conception of gender shifts and maybe reconnects to other indigenous conceptions of gender, then we can start to make space for queer indigenous youth. So what kinds of organizations exist in your city, right? Is it part of the Pride Center? Is it an additional place? Maybe there's somewhere that that exists. Where are two-spirit people kind of being supported in your city? The last question that I'll ask about kind of the communities in your places is how does accessibility and disability intersect with indigeneity in the places where you are? And I didn't have this for a long time when I was doing this work, but I'm a friend of mine whose son has FASD. So this is a really important thing to consider. How does disability intersect with the needs of indigenous people? And the TRC, which I mentioned before, actually is one of the first places that I've ever seen really clearly make the link between FASD and historical trauma. So think about the way that fetal alcohol spectrum syndrome, yeah, FAS. How does FAS also intersect with this historical trauma that people are working through? So there might be organizations that actually have really specific services for different kinds of people. And so where do those exist? So what I'm going to get you to do now is have a look at your answers that you have. We're going to scooch back to the original one. And I'm going to get one person to raise their hand and kind of respond to each of these questions. So Joe is going to grab a mic. And I'm going to just zoom with your hair. And there we go. We can answer this first question together. So I'm going to ask you actually to raise your hands. Do you have an Indigenous Student Center organization, your institution? Cool. And then whoever would like to speak to it, keep your hand up. Go over it. We got a mic. We recently did get an Indigenous Student Center at our university. I think it was either the fifth or sixth one added. But what's been really weird to me is that when I go on our university website and I look for all of our campus community centers, it's not listed on the website. But the Black Resource Centers there, the RASA Resource Centers there, the LGBT Resource Centers there, and they're all in like a nice bulleted list. And at first I thought, well maybe they're just still getting situated. But it's been a year. Interesting. Yeah. And I mean, keep your answers. And I want you to talk with them later with the people around you. Who is it? And do you have any Indigenous administrators in your institutions? You do? Like a handful. Is anyone who answered yes to this willing to kind of talk about what that position looks like? Is a hand over here too? Hi. She's our Chief Diversity Officer. And she's multi-racialed, you know. Is there a position that exists specifically for Indigenous concerns? Go for it. So we're just going to be here. Over to the side. Hi, at the University of Alberta we have a Dean of Native Studies who is now going into a vice provost's role for Indigenous issues. Indigenous issues. Although I don't think the word issues is being used. Right. Yeah, go for it. Kevin Brown, University of New Mexico. As a New Mexico, we have 23 distinct tribal communities, all with federal recognition. And we have specific treaties and NYU signed with the university. So we have a special assistant to the president position. He was run by a Pueblo woman named Pamela Goya, and which eventually led to my position, which I'm the director of the Indigenous Nations Library Program at UNM. So there is a longstanding, I guess, relationship with Indigenous communities, formal, federal, and then also state level. Thank you. That also kind of talks to who can make decisions, right? So getting Indigenous people and people who are considering Indigenous issues into those levels means that we now have you with us, which is great. And so that's a necessary thing, right? Who has the power to make those decisions? Who has library staff positions that relate specifically to Indigenous concerns? Who has an Indigenous Studies or Native American Studies program in their institution? So there's a difference between those two set of hands, right? And that's something that's not surprising to me. But does anyone who has a library staff position connected to these concerns want to talk about that at all? Go for it. So my position, again, with the NYU, was specifically designed for academic student success. So we have Native American Studies, Chicano Studies, and then also the Latin American Studies. So we do curriculum development, curriculum support for them. And it's really important for accreditation. And there is undergraduate and graduate level degrees with that. And then the other component that my program and other programs do is recruitment and retention, because retention is really important. Important component of academic student success. 70% of Indigenous students within my community and then actually nationally don't make it after their first year. So it's really important for that. Yeah, thanks. So those staff positions might be dealing with a wide variety of different things, right? There's covering of curriculum, retention, recruitment. It might be dealing with also looking at hiring practices in our own institutions. It might be dealing with content, right? And so who's teaching these sorts of things? All right, this is one of my favorite ones to do because I think we so rarely think about the city as called anything else but what we often call it. And so does anyone wanna speak to kind of this process of maybe finding out what else the place is, the place where they live in is also called? Yes, in the back. The entire history of the Native populations in the area. The next article I looked at was Wikipedia, yes, I know. But I was curious to see that there was almost no mention of the Native populations in the land that Denver began at 1800 something. Yeah, we have a very clear like birthing moment when Denver emerges. Yeah, we can also think too like through this research process because I mean we're all librarians, right? So I'm gonna curious a little bit. But I think that process is really illuminating too, right? Where do you actually find this information, right? And in many cases it's hard to find, right? Unless there's been maybe a feature on it, it's a bit of a challenge to get to this information. And that has a lot to do with the erasure of indigenous people but also about a completely different set of world views, right? Yeah, in the back. Hi, I was just gonna add that I think one of the challenges is also shifting thinking to realize that the city as we might think of it now is not the unit of place or whatever that may, that's not, like there are Minneapolis here that's, there's probably no place named for Minneapolis because there was no such thing as Minneapolis as a concept. There were various places within what we now call Minneapolis that I'm sure had different names. Like I tried to look and see, I found the name of the place for St. Anthony Falls which is a sacred place, right? Right where the University of Minnesota is very near but I don't know that there was ever any name that would have encompassed what we call Minneapolis now. And I wanna challenge that too because I think that there are Dakota people who definitely talk about Minneapolis in Dakota right now, right? So I totally agree, right? We're dealing with, I think that idea of unit of place is a really good one, right? We think about ourselves as being maybe city, state, country, city province, country but units of place for indigenous people are drastically different, right? We're thinking maybe kind of individual, family, clan, maybe, well, depending on where you are but nation kind of, and that's different for many different people, right? So I think that's a really good point. What treaties are you party to? And I'm super interested in this question because I know the Canadian context very well and I don't know the American context a lot at all so I'm curious to see like what did people find for this question? Did you find anything at all? Who had a really hard time finding this information? Yes, this is a common thing. Yes, you had your hand up. Oh yeah, okay, we'll go over here and then we'll go over here. Well, I found information about the Treaty of Greenville which ended the Indian Wars in Ohio and that was the first time I found anything in this search because when you're looking up Columbus you get a very different set of issues instead of looking at the name of the city you find out more about renaming Columbus Day to Indigenous Day. So while that was fascinating, didn't really help with the question but I did find one treaty but I didn't find enough about what it did other than it ended a war and started creating areas that include what is Columbus, Ohio. Right, that's a super interesting answer. I never thought about the challenge of researching Columbus, Ohio. You had another answer as well. Just based on quickly looking, William Penn was making treaties with, I'm from Philadelphia and so William Penn in Pennsylvania was making treaties with Native Americans and they said the first one there's no written document of but it was primarily over time land, taking land for Pennsylvania. In many cases that is what we see. Land is kind of at the core of a lot of it. So the next question, what are your treaty rights? I'm not gonna, oh yeah, go for it. Could you just talk a little bit about how we live on land that was never ceded? So. Sure, yes, that is a whole other side of it. So the reason that I kind of root this in discussion of treaty is that an Indigenous perception of treaty differs wildly from I think the more commonly held idea that it is giving up of land, seeding land. So I'll give an example from treaty six because that's the one I'm most familiar with and that's the one that kind of grounds my own work. So treaty six was signed by primarily Cree people but as well a number of other people as well and from because we have this law of will go to and kind of structuring our work, it means that this was not seen as a seeding of land in any way but is actually a forging of a relationship. And so there's terminology around treaty six from Indigenous people as oral histories of treaty making and they see it as taking someone as their cousin. So there's a particular word that goes along with that but that's a process. So we're taking the Queen's children as cousins and you'll notice that that's very different terminology than we often see where it's the Queen taking Indigenous people as her children. So those are two very different power dynamics, right? Like a parental, very condescending relationship versus a cousin kinship which in Cree kinship rules has really specific reciprocal natures to it. So that's kind of I think at the core of a lot of reasons why we talk about treaties is the way that they're perceived by different people that sign them is wildly different and I think that really comes to why Indigenous people still center treaties so often and why we are super aware of how they've kind of not been lived up to whereas I think a non-Indigenous perspective often thinks of them as always, it's kind of sad we didn't live up to them and we just took the land but it's a much more complicated contract, it's a much more complicated kinship creation that we usually see and I don't know if that's true in other places but that's from a Cree perspective like a Nihil perspective thinks about it as a relationship building. Yeah. So this question is also a challenging one and especially if you had a hard time finding out the treaty but thinking about what your treaty rates are in general, I'm not gonna linger on it but I like what it does is it forces us to think about where am I in all of this, right? Like this isn't something that happened long ago if I'm non-Indigenous, where do I, where am I positioned? And in most cases it means like I'm not gonna get killed which is great but let's move on to this next one too. What reserves are settlements? What reservations are close to where you live and work? So who had, who knew some of them before? Like maybe you were aware of them for the rest of you like who was it a surprise? Surprise to know are there any around? Are there any that are actually close? Are you in an area where there's maybe not any reservations? I'm interested to hear kind of your responses to this question. If anyone is interested in sharing. Yes, over here. I think there's also a mic here if that's easier, for sure. I appreciate you. So I'm from Georgia and what I found through my quick couple minutes of research is that there aren't any federally recognized tribes in Georgia that were all systematically removed by the government between like 1802 and 1825 and then they made up this lottery act to give some settlers and people from Europe land or acts plots of land. And so it's like there's still a few native groups who weren't, who avoided being forced to move to Oklahoma. But it's like they don't have reservations. They don't have any tribal affiliation that the government recognizes. And it's like the numbers of them are so small that they don't seem to have any major organizations within Atlanta or the wider Georgia state. It's like they're viewed as being historical figures only. They don't, they are seen as not existing anymore. Right. Yeah, that's a super interesting idea, right? Is that we're positioning ourselves in places where removal is a huge part of this story, right? And also sort of, and this is a part of this I think as well as distant ancestors. And so this often comes up when we talk about indigeneity, right? Many people will be like, oh, I had a Cherokee grandmother. This one Cherokee woman probably had so many kids because honestly, like these poor women. But no, like we're thinking about oftentimes when we don't have a really big indigenous population there's a tendency to kind of think about it as like, oh, there's some distant ancestors or maybe I know somebody who's like part whatever. We don't have a locus of indigenous organizing in a city or not a very visible one. That's an interesting place to consider indigeneity because indigeneity is still something that surrounds the context of where we live and work even if there isn't like the population has been systematically removed. So that is a very different thing than kind of being in maybe Calgary where there is a higher indigenous population. What it does is it kind of just create more of a challenge to kind of reach out to those that actually are there, right? And there's a lot of intersections with kind of more mixed communities too, right? That's a big part of that. Yeah, go for it. I appreciate the talk and the questions are very thought provoking. And I work at a flagship university. And so the idea of proximity, there are no reservations though there are reservations in our state. There's none that are anywhere near our campus though we have extension offices all over the state. But it made me think we've kind of imposed over those folks as you said earlier, kind of a county and a state structure that didn't exist before. But then in thinking about it made me think well really rather these folks, you know, these people live close to that part of their responsibility of being the flagship university doesn't really, I mean if they're anywhere in our state there's some, you know, it's a consideration. Yeah, it kind of gets that question who are you responsible for an accountability, right? Even if they're not like neighbors, like in Calgary, it's right up next to us. But they might be kind of hours away. And that's still kind of a community to think about kind of connecting to. Let's get to this much harder question. What urban indigenous communities are in your city? Yeah, in the back, go for it. Hi, yes, I'm in Las Vegas. And we actually have two, the same indigenous community overall, but there's two locations. One is the reservation, which is outside of the city. But within the city there's a sovereign nation that's 31 acres large in the middle of downtown. So that's where our indigenous urban community is. That is such an interesting context. That exists, anyone else have urban indigenous reservations or sovereign land? Yeah. Yeah, oh Edmonton, yeah, yeah. Hello, hello Kancon, Canadian content. Yeah, so you know our reserve is similar to Tsutina in that it's like a budding Edmonton, right? And it's inside of the city. So that's one component. What if that's not the case? Are there still native people that live in all of your cities? For sure. So where are they hanging out? Yeah, yeah, I think. So I'm at a university outside of Baltimore, Maryland. And when I was googling, I found the Baltimore American Indian Center, which was found in 1968 to support Lumbee people. I didn't know it existed, so I learned something new. And I also learned that there's actually quite a significant population of Lumbee people in the Baltimore region, so. So we often see things like friendship centers or organizations like this one that have literally been created to be like, all right, there's all these native people that have shown up in the city. They need to find each other and hang out and support each other. So we see that with the rise of urbanization, kind of the move to cities. It doesn't necessarily mean that people are even necessarily from that territory, right? But places that people congregate, organizations that have been created. In Minneapolis, you're very lucky to have the American Indian Movement Interpretive Center. And so even places like that that are almost more like interpretive centers, museums, those are also places of gathering. Those are communities that are connected to many other people, too. So how are your libraries connecting to those places? These last two questions about Two-Spirit and Queer Indigenous Organizations and Accessibility and Disability Organizations are also more challenging, right? And it's hard to find these questions. But did anybody find an organization that they know of in their city? Yeah. I had to look at some, I didn't know it, but there is a Two-Spirit circle of Edmonton society. Yes, there is. Yeah, I'm very familiar with that circle myself. So yes, they exist, seek them out, right? They can use their resources, they can use their space. How about accessibility and disability organizations? Did anyone find ones that in their cities? All right, we can leave it at that, right? And that's a question to take home. Where are these organizations existing? So in the last 10 minutes that we have, or we'll maybe kind of scoot through these pretty quickly, I'm asking three questions now. So you're gonna have a long list of communities in front of you. We have three more questions to kind of talk about. What is, how do we deal with these communities? So how can you nurture these relationships? That's my first question. So when community members come to your library, if they come, what restrictions do they face? So that can be things that are as simple as opening hours, right? How long, how long do you open until? Are you connected to transit? What's the parking situation like? Do you have to pay $14 to park on campus? Cause that's what we have to do at Mount Royal. So who does that ensure is not in our spaces? We can even think about things like where we're physically located, right? Where in the city is our university? We can think about the age restrictions of borrower profiles. So how old do you have to be in order to take books out? Or do you have to be a university student to take resources out? And then restrictions around language. So what languages are your collections in? What languages are your signage in? That's sort of it too. So think about what restrictions might be present in your own libraries. This also includes things that may be unwelcoming, right? So we're thinking about racist collection materials or a lack of materials on the communities where people are from. Especially the ones that we just identified. So if a queer, lumpy person comes into the library, are they able to find stuff on lumpy queerness? Does that exist in your collection, right? All right. So the next question is furthering those relationships. So do these communities know what we have? And this is always like a question that university libraries have, right? Does the population know what we actually have? And I wanna talk, because a lot of my work deals with language revitalization. I wanna talk about the role of libraries in language revitalization really quickly. And so I see there being actually three really distinct roles that libraries play. And one is to have a responsive collection. So a collection that has materials in the languages of the places that you're in that are being taught. And this means sometimes it's challenging to find because they might be community created resources. So like a do a tang full of stuff. It might be self-published stuff. It might be stuff that's out of print. It's harder work to try and get these materials into our collections, but it's worth it. So that's one of them is making sure your collection actually has language materials. The second one is simply providing spaces, right? So libraries have a lot of space that community organizations may not have access to. And so how can we open up our spaces to any of the people that are already teaching these classes or teaching, doing this sort of even conversation circles or language nests, how can we invite them into our spaces? And it's really important that we don't have to be the ones that are doing the programming here, right? We can step away and that's just fine, right? We're providing the space as opposed to necessarily the teaching. Let the people that have been doing this for years and years do what they do best. And then the third one is special collections and archives. So there's a really good example with the Wappanawg Language Revitalization Project with Jesse Little-Do-Baird, where she revitalized basically a language that had been sleeping for seven generations, Wappanawg. It's a language of the people that met the pilgrims. And no one had spoken it in seven generations and her daughter is the first native speaker of Wappanawg. And this was primarily accomplished because of its connection to other Algonquin languages, but as well through historical documents. So she went to archives and special collections and found old grammars, old hymnals, glossaries, diaries, all kinds of stuff that were related to that and used those materials to help further their language project. So do your communities know that you have a grammar from the 1700s or did they know that you have some like wax recordings of speakers from ages ago? Because that is such a valuable resource to communities. So think about kind of how you can let these communities know what you got. The last question is how can these be reciprocal relationships? So how do we go about not just asking of indigenous communities to show up and kind of be the beads and feathers on a day, right? Like make the photo shoot look prettier. We're interested in how, figuring out what these communities want. And this is where we connect to larger issues. This is where we connect to Native Americans being killed by police. This is where we connect to water crisis on reservations. This is where we connect to poverty. These are big issues that face indigenous people in the North America. And so oftentimes it's hard for a library to consider ourselves in this way, right? Like we can have a great responsive collection, but if the people that we are closely tied to on whose land we are are experiencing a water, there's no drinking water. What can we do, right? And so really thinking about our own positionality in this process is really essential. So those are our three questions. How can these relationships be nurtured? How can they be furthered? And then how can they be reciprocal? So I have about four minutes left. I'm gonna close up and I'm gonna basically give some space for a couple of questions. So thank you. I could say I'm gonna ask them to know how. Questions, can you hear me? Yeah. There. Maybe come up and stand at the mics. Yeah. Give me a rest. Does that work? Yes. Okay. Yeah, thank you very much. I have a question regarding the ambivalence of Western education and repositories of education. Of course, you know boarding schools or residential schools are contributors to the cultural erosion. You yourself as an indigenous librarian, how do you position yourself to fulfill these questions but also to not replace indigenous knowledge in that and actually acknowledge your own power you have to. Totally. Yeah, that's a really, really good question. Right now, so I just came from and it's still on a ceremony that's going on at our library in Mount Royal University. And so walking with our sisters is both an art installation and a ceremonial bundle that commemorates murdered or missing indigenous women. So this is an epidemic across North America. And so what it is, is a bundle that has moccasin tops. So the vamps, the beaded parts of moccasins arranged in a winding path along the floor. And you walk alongside these memorials. These moccasins are left unfinished to commemorate the unfinished lives of these women, girls, two-spirit relatives that we've lost. And this is an interesting thing to have in a library because on one side of it, it's that logistics, right? Like how do I get security to be okay with this, like us being in here and how are they okay with smudging in the library? So people kind of burning sage and sweet grass. That's one side of my job that I think I'm happy to do, right? Like dealing with the administration side of it. But there's also the ceremonial side of it which is really challenging too because why should an art installation like this be in a library? And my discussion of it was that bundles our knowledge transfer through material culture. And knowledge transfer is what a library is all about. And so it's making space for a very different way of knowledge transfer in a way that is almost unrecognizable to many librarians and library staff. But it's a way to bring in some of those worldviews and some of those perspectives. Like it comes from an Métis and Anishinaabe women's lodge. Like that's where the protocols come from. And so it's situated in a very different way than the other kinds of knowledge that we have. And so I see my role really as making space for those kinds of knowledges, right? Making sure that it's not just like the anthropology books about the tribes that are around us. I mean, that's important. That's a huge component of our collection. But also the other stuff, right? And so how do you cite a drum? How do you cite an oral history that is not just like an APA, it's not like a personal interview. It is being told to you by an individual. But it's coming from a long history of citation that comes from the person that it was told to by them and that person and the person beyond them. And so there's a lot of systems in libraries such as something like citation that are inadequate to deal with indigenous knowledge systems. So I see our roles as actually making space for that, right? Is saying, you know what, these are complete knowledge systems that are out there that we can invite into library spaces. And there's a real tendency to want to fit it into a particular box, right? Like we can only have an elder come and do a prayer at the start of a talk, right? And that's the only time they talk about it. Or there's a real sense of like maybe elders come in and they are maybe there to just kind of like be in good faith. But those are people that may have like really specific knowledges that we can share. So that's a big part of it, I think. Thinking through the way that this works and thinking through the power that's involved there. And I think I can kind of get to it around the language revitalization piece is like, I don't need to be teaching this language, right? I mean maybe I want to be, but there are people that have literally been doing this work for decades. And the best thing that I can do is literally like give them a parking pass, give them space in the library, make sure they have coffee, and like maybe let them have access to like our collection. That's a ton that they're not getting from other places too, right? So some of it is us taking a step back and realizing that there's entire indigenous knowledge systems that we are like very ignorant of. So it's a very humbling experience, I think. But that's a tough question. I mean, there's a saying like when an elder dies, an entire library is burned. And I think that that's a really important thing to think about too, is like libraries often think of themselves as like the site of where all this knowledge happens. But in indigenous worldview, this place is very inconsequential, yeah. So that's a very long answer to your good question. Are there questions? OK. Hi, I'm from York, Toronto. Hey. So at York, I'm actually the human rights and equity studies. I would be the librarian that's responsible for indigenous studies. And responding to the TRC, they're expanding the indigenous studies program. So when you mentioned that, we should think about credentialing. And so I've been thinking about advocating for an indigenous services librarian. But now I'm reconsidering that. But I'm just a little bit concerned about the union and protection. And also, I know that there is a small number of Aboriginal indigenous librarians across Canada. But what are the alternatives to ensure that they have security? I see that in the form of having MLS and having faculty status at my institution. Good question. A good example of this is at in Peterborough. What is the University of Peterborough? Trent, thank you. Canadian librarians, hold me down. Trent, at Trent, elders have faculty status there. And so sometimes it's actually thinking about. And so they have a list of criteria, how do they achieve tenure, all of that stuff. There's lots of questions about, how can someone gauge if an elder has achieved that criteria? That's a whole other side of things. But that's where they take care of them, to make sure that there is protection for them. Because I think that's a huge part of this too. The other side of things I didn't really mention is when we talk about indigenous knowledge is in the library, compensation is a big part of it. Protection is a big part of it. We have structures that exist that help us do our work. And we want to make sure that those of the people that we're bringing into the institution are being compensated appropriately and being taken care of. So maybe that's more than just having a cup of coffee waiting for them. That's oftentimes like taking it to the bargaining table. Credentialing is a tough one too, because oftentimes it'll be like minimum standard. So what's the minimum degree that someone can have? And it's worth questioning kind of, is this something that's flexible? And so I'm not sure, like I'm really curious to see what Calgary Public Library, how they kind of got around it. And thinking about acknowledging indigenous knowledges as like an equivalency. And that's a huge, like who makes that equivalency? That's a huge other side of things. But if you're asking for somebody to be versed in indigenous knowledges and also have a PhD, you're asking for essentially two PhDs, right? And so thinking through what that looks like is a huge challenge for administrators. But I think it's a really good question. The other thing too is thinking about supporting someone that's already doing the work, right? So somebody that's maybe working in an interpretive center or a museum or a tribal archives, right? And so how can those people maybe be like cross appointed essentially, right? Coming into your institution while still being able to like do the work that they're doing in their communities. So we don't always have to reinvent the wheel. There's definitely people working in the tribal communities that you have identified. So who are those people? That's a big part of it, right? It's just using kind of the knowledge that already exists out there. Okay, unfortunately we need to wrap this session up. So before we extend another thank you to Jesse for her session and our knowledge today, I just wanted to remind you that lunch from 12.30 to 1.45 I believe in the stars room, which is where breakfast and lunch were earlier today and yesterday. And then also following lunch, there's a plenary session here in the galaxy room. So could we do another thank you to Jesse?