Presented for Peer Council 2018 by Kalani Adolpho, Diversity Resident Librarian, UW-Madison College Library Libraries and archives are colonial impositions in many parts of the world, including lands that are now part of the United States Empire. As colonial impositions, libraries are complicit in the perpetuation of colonialism and Western hegemony through classification systems and controlled vocabularies. Through Library of Congress Subject Headings, Indigenous, queer, and gender non-conforming people are historicized, homogenized, and misnamed, and violence perpetuated against us is erased and/or referenced euphemistically. This session will define, name impact, and provide examples of colonialism in cataloguing and classification, as well as share information on alternative headings and organization systems developed by Indigenous peoples and nations. Additionally, there will be ample time for questions and discussion after the presentation.

1. DECOLONIZING
CATALOGING AND
CLASSIFICATION
K A L A N I A D O L P H O
D I V E R S I T Y R E S I D E N T L I B R A R I A N
U W - M A D I S O N

2. DIVERSITY AND
WHITENESS IN
THE PROFESSION

3. OVER 85% OF LIBRARIANS ARE WHITE

4. HAVE DIVERSITY EFFORTS IN
RECRUITMENT BEEN SUCCESSFUL?
A/PI/NH= Asian/Pacific
Islander/Native
Hawaiian
NA/NA= Native
American/Native
Alaskan

5. RETENTION IS A PROBLEM
• “ [By] focusing on numbers rather than the deeper issues of experience and structural
discrimination allows the profession to take a self-congratulatory and complacent approach
to the ‘problem of diversity’ without ever overtly naming and addressing the issue of
whiteness.”
 April Hathcock, “White Librarianship in Blackface: Diversity Initiatives in LIS”
• “One must ask oneself if it would be possible to really achieve diversity without challenging
our racist, homophobic and sexist consciousnesses that are so deeply imbedded that we
don’t even recognize them? If we are [ignorant] to our unconscious biases, then striving for
numerically diverse organizations is building on a foundation of sand.”
– ShinJoung Yeo and James R. Jacobs
Diversity Matters? Rethinking Diversity in Libraries

6. WHAT IS WHITENESS?
 “First, whiteness is a location of structural advantage, of race privilege. Second, it is a
‘standpoint,’ a place from which white people look at [themselves], at others, and at
society. Third, ‘whiteness’ refers to a set of cultural practices that are usually
unmarked and unnamed.
 Ruth Frankenberg. White Women, Race Matters
 Whiteness is invisible/“normal”
 People do not notice their privilege until it is pointed out (and even then, many choose to
get defensive)
 Inclusion efforts means exclusion is a problem
 Diversity initiatives, diversity residencies, and mentoring help marginalized groups
adjust, assimilate, and perform whiteness

7. TERMS AND
CONCEPTS

8. WHITE FRAGILITY
• White people in North America are protected from race-based stress
• White fragility: a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes
intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves including:
• Anger
• Fear
• Guilt
• Argumentation
• Silence
• Segregation (in social settings, neighborhoods, workplaces, etc.) is the first factor leading
to white fragility.

9. TERMS: NATIVE & SETTLER
COLONIALISM
• A note on the use of native/indigenous
• Settler colonialism

10. LIBRARY OF
CONGRESS
CLASSIFICATION
E X A M P L E S A N D I M PA C T

11. B E F O R E A N D A F T E R
T H E H O R I Z O N :
A N I S H I N A A B E
A R T I S T S O F T H E
G R E AT L A K E S
"Illustrated with 70 color
images of visually powerful
historical and contemporary
works, this book--which
accompanies an exhibition of
the same title opening in
August 2013 at the National
Museum of the American
Indian in New York--reveals
how Anishinaabe […] artists
have expressed the deeply
rooted spiritual and social
dimensions of their relations
with the Great Lakes region."

12. L I B R A R Y O F
C O N G R E S S S U B J E C T
H E A D I N G S
Ojibwa art -- Exhibitions.
Art, American -- Great Lakes
Region (North America) --
Exhibitions.
Art, Canadian -- Great Lakes
Region (North America) --
Exhibitions

13. N6538 A4 B44 2013
N5300-7418: FINE ARTS—
VISUAL ARTS—HISTORY
EXPECTATIONS: EXHIBITIONS REALITY: HISTORY

14. O R I G I N A L LO C A L :
I N D I G E N O U S F O O D S ,
S TO R I E S , A N D
R E C I P E S F R O M T H E
U P P E R M I D W E S T
“[Indigenous peoples’] menus
were truly the "original local,"
celebrated here in sixty home-
tested recipes paired with profiles
of tribal activists, food
researchers, families, and chefs.
[…] The innovative recipes
collected here--from Ramp
Kimchi to Three Sisters Salsa,
from Manoomin Lasagna to
Venison Mole Chili--will inspire
home cooks not only to make
better use of the foods all around
them but also to honor the
storied heritage they represent.”

15. S U B J E C T S
Indians of North America—
Food—Northwest, Old.
Indian cooking.
Local foods—Northwest, Old.
CO N T E N T T Y P E S
Cookbooks

16. E98 F7 E735 2013
E75-99: HISTORY OF THE AMERICAS—AMERICA—
INDIANS OF NORTH AMERICA
EXPECTATIONS: COOKING REALITY: HISTORY

17. INDIGENOUS
RELIGIONS
Maybe? (But
please don’t
put it under
“mythology”
)

18. BL2500-2592:
AMERICAN
“FOR
AMERICAN
INDIANS, SEE
CLASSES E-F”

19. E75-99: “INDIANS OF NORTH
AMERICA”

20. FIRST NATIONS LANGUAGES

21. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CLASSIFICATION:
TREATMENT OF NATIVE AMERICANS
 Represent Western knowledge frameworks, developed in the late 19th and early 20
centuries
 Native peoples are “history”
 Use of the settler’s language and the settler’s terms
 Homogenization of Native nations
 Reduction of Native knowledge and concepts
 Offensive/Outdated terminology

22. HISTORY CLASSIFICATION IMPACT
• “Indeed, colonialism has, as one of its goals, the obliteration rather than the
incorporation of indigenous peoples.
[…]
Our daily existence in the modern world is thus best described not as a struggle for
civil rights but a struggle against our planned disappearance.”—Haunani-Kay Trask,
From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’i

23. LIBRARY OF
CONGRESS
SUBJECT
HEADINGS
E X A M P L E S A N D I M PA C T

24. AMERICAN
HOLOCAUST:
THE CONQUEST
OF THE NEW
WORLD
BY DAVID E.
STANNARD

25. EXCERPT FROM
THE
INTRODUCTION
OF AMERICAN
HOLOCAUST

26. AMERICAN HOLOCAUST:
SUBJECT HEADINGS
 Columbus, Christopher – Influence
 Indians, Treatment of
 Indians -- First contact with Europeans
 America -- Discovery and exploration – Spanish

27. A SHORT
ACCOUNT OF
THE
DESTRUCTION
OF THE INDIES
BY BARTOLOMÉ
DE LAS CASAS

28. EXCERPT FROM
THE BEGINNING
OF
A SHORT
ACCOUNT OF
THE
DESTRUCTION
OF THE INDIES,
ORIGINALLY
PUBLISHED IN
1552
• It was upon these gentle lambs, imbued by the
Creator with all the qualities we have mentioned,
that from the very first day they clapped eyes on
them the Spanish fell like ravening wolves upon
the fold, or like tigers and savage lions who have
not eaten meat for days. The pattern established
at the outset has remained unchanged to this day,
and the Spaniards still do nothing save tear the
natives to shreds, murder them and inflict upon
them untold misery, suffering and distress,
tormenting, harrying and persecuting them
mercilessly. We shall in due course describe some
of the many ingenious methods of torture they
have invented and refined for this purpose, but
one can get some idea of the effectiveness of
their methods from the figures alone. When the
Spanish first journeyed there, the indigenous
population of the island of Hispaniola stood at
some three million; today only two hundred
survive.

29. A SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE DESTRUCTION
OF THE INDIES:
SUBJECT HEADINGS
• Indians, Treatment of—Latin America
• Spain—Colonies—America.

30. NATIVE
AMERICAN
DNA : TRIBAL
BELONGING
AND THE
FALSE
PROMISE OF
GENETIC
SCIENCE BY
KIM TALLBEAR

31. ABSTRACT
FOR NATIVE
AMERICAN
DNA: TRIBAL
BELONGING
AND THE
FALSE
PROMISE OF
GENETIC
SCIENCE
BY KIM
TALLBEAR
“Who is a Native American? And who gets to decide? …
In Native American DNA, Kim TallBear shows how DNA
testing is a powerful—and problematic—scientific process
that is useful in determining close biological relatives. But
tribal membership is a legal category that has developed in
dependence on certain social understandings and historical
contexts, a set of concepts that entangles genetic
information in a web of family relations, reservation histories,
tribal rules, and government regulations. At a larger level,
TallBear asserts, the ‘markers’ that are identified and applied
to specific groups such as Native American tribes bear the
imprints of the cultural, racial, ethnic, national, and even
tribal misinterpretations of the humans who study them.
TallBear notes that ideas about racial science, which informed
white definitions of tribes in the nineteenth century, are
unfortunately being revived in twenty-first-century
laboratories. Because today’s science seems so compelling,
increasing numbers of Native Americans have begun to
believe their own metaphors: ‘in our blood’ is giving way to
‘in our DNA.’ This rhetorical drift, she argues, has significant
consequences, and ultimately she shows how Native
American claims to land, resources, and sovereignty that

32. NATIVE AMERICAN DNA:
SUBJECT HEADINGS
 Indians of North America -- Anthropometry.
 Human population genetics -- North America.
 DNA fingerprinting -- North America.

33. GENDER
• With few exceptions, Indigenous third, fourth, fifth, and sixth genders do not have
subject headings
– No headings for fa’afafine, fakaleiti, or māhū
– There is a heading for “Two Spirit people,” but Two-Spirit is an umbrella term

34. CONTROLLED VOCABULARIES ARE
NOT NEUTRAL
• Hope Olson argues that, “in imposing controlled vocabulary,
we construct both a limited system for the representation of
information and a universality/diversity binary opposition. Our
systems seem transparent. They appear unbiased and
universally applicable—but they actually hide their exclusions
under the guise of neutrality. Not surprisingly, this
fundamental presumption on which our practice rests
disproportionately affects access to information outside of the
cultural mainstream and about groups marginalized in our
society”

35. RUNNING THEMES
 Homogenization
 Lack of specificity
 Lack of acknowledgement of Native sovereignty
 Minimization of genocide

36. GENOCIDE
• Library of Congress Subject Headings and classification reinforce popular erasure of
Native American genocide
• Instead, we assign “euphemistic, misleading, and colonial subject headings”
• Our headings and call numbers create a barrier to discovery and act as a form of
holocaust denial

37. NAME AUTHORITY CONTROL
• Western spellings of non-Western names
• Privileging names outsiders use versus names people use for themselves and within
their cultures
• Recording gender in Name Authority Records
• Be on the lookout for: Ethical Questions in Name Authority Control, ed. Jane Sandberg
through Library Juice Press this fall.

38. DECOLONIZING
LIBRARIES

39. REFLECTION / SMALL
GROUP DISCUSSION
/ SHARE OUT
WHAT ARE SOME
POSSIBLE
SOLUTIONS TO ANY
OF THE PREVIOUSLY
MENTIONED ISSUES
IN RESOURCE
DESCRIPTION AND
CL ASSIFICATION?

40. POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS
• Multi-cultural librarianship, non-European language courses, ethnic studies, and non-
mainstream white history courses should be required as part of the MLIS
• Hire people from the communities you seek to represent
• Value alternative pathways to expertise (outside of degrees) when it comes to
recruitment
• Collaborate with communities, pay them for their time, let them keep their materials
– Post-Custodial Praxis!
• Use alternative subject headings and classification systems
• Re-describe materials already in your collections
• Consider ethically and culturally responsive content management systems like Mukurtu

41. LIBRARY
DECOLONIZATION
PROJECTS

42. MASHANTUCKET PEQUOT
THESAURUS OF AMERICAN
INDIAN TERMINOLOGY
• “…created in response to the inadequate use of the English language and the exclusion
of Indigenous philosophies in the description of American Indian subjects in
mainstream controlled vocabularies. The project addresses this disparity by providing
an Indigenous philosophy as the structure for organizing information.
• “It is designed to be user-centered and to reflect the information-seeking behavior of
Native and non-Native scholars and researchers who conduct research on American
Indians.”
• “As a controlled vocabulary, the primary goal of the Thesaurus is to inform Library of
Congress Subject Headings.”
Littletree & Metoyer, pp. 641, 644, 645.

43. THE FOUR DOMAINS OF THE
MASHANTUCKET PEQUOT THESAURUS

44. S P I R I T UA L D O M A I N
( E A S T )
Dimensions:
Time
Space
Manifestations:
Sacred Ceremonial
Practices
Legendary Beings
Sacred Objects
Sacred Plants
Tobacco
Sacred Practitioners
Sacred Beings
Philosophy
Creation
Afterworld

45. ALTERNATIVE THESAURI
• The Mashantucket Pequot Thesaurus of American Indian Terminology
• National Indian Law Library Thesaurus
• First Nations House of Learning Thesaurus
• Maori Subject Headings Thesaurus
• The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Thesaurus

46. M U KURTU
Community driven, ethically
minded content
management system for
digital heritage materials
Access is controlled by
cultural protocols
Indigenous knowledge does
not “want to be free”

47. CONCLUSION
• Libraries are 85% white, recruitment is offered as the main solution
• Library of Congress classification and subject headings perpetuate colonialism and are
inadequate to describe Indigenous materials
• Alternative classification systems and subject headings have been made in response to
the inadequacy and offensiveness of LC
• We have a lot of work to do

48. REFLECTION / SMALL GROUP
DISCUSSION / SHARE OUT
1. How is colonialism perpetuated in your institution?
2. What might decolonization look like in your work?
3. What are the barriers to this work?
4. How can we overcome these barriers?
5. Are you familiar with any other decolonization
projects that you would like to share?

49. REFERENCES AND
FURTHER READINGS
HT TPS:// TINYURL.COM /
DECOLONIZINGLIBRARIES
QUESTIONS?