Ękwehę̀·we. Anishinaabe. Dine’é.
The people or real people.

When Christopher Columbus reached the shores of Taíno territory, he mistakenly labelled the people he encountered “Indians” thinking he had reached India. For this reason, Gregory Younging in his style guide Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples, calls the term “a misnomer from the start” and the name stuck. Take a look through any library catalog and you will find subject headings like “Indians of North America,” “Indian Art,” or “Indian Captivities” (there is no European equivalent). The misnomer is used everywhere, in everyday conversation, in federal government documents and of course the Library of Congress Subject Headings. “Indians” carries with it certain stereotypes, not to mention confusion with topics pertaining to India.

According to the Library of Congress’s website, “[t]he Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) is perhaps the most widely adopted subject indexing language in the world, has been translated into many languages, and is used around the world by libraries large and small.” Subject headings link materials by topic to make it possible for researchers to search the library catalog via phrases like “Indians of North America” and “Indian Art.” These subject headings are created and maintained by the Library of Congress which comes with its own inherent bias (white, male, European).

In recent years, libraries and other cataloging institutions have started to look more critically at the way they catalog. As a Native American Fellow this summer, working with the Phillips Library collection, I was tasked with developing recommendations for evaluating catalog records. Some of the objectives of this summer project were to conduct searches in the library catalog to find instances of bias (there were many) and research how other libraries are working towards addressing these biases within their catalog records.

This provides the initial steps toward reaching the larger goals of the Library:

• Replacing western-minded terms with terms preferred by Indigenous communities

• Creating catalog records which reflect topic terms that researchers would actually be searching for

• Creating catalog records which incorporate topic terms that Indigenous scholars would use

• Enabling access to library collections for Indigenous people

• Outlining policies for more culturally sensitive cataloging practices

I’m Skarù·ręʔ or Tuscarora. The Tuscarora Nation is one of the Six Nations that make up the Haudenosaunee (Ho-deno-SHOW-nee) Confederacy. You probably know us better as the “Iroquois,” a French mispronunciation of an Algonquian word meaning “snakes.” Europeans seemed to have a way with taking the words of a nation’s enemies and applying the name to the people they were dealing with in perpetuity. The first week I was at the library, I searched through PhilCat to find anything of interest for my own research. My instinct was to search “Haudenosaunee” -- our word for the Confederacy which means “they build a house.” My search returned five results. From past experience, I knew searching “Haudenosaunee” would yield little. Honestly, I was surprised the search yielded that many results.