Reconnecting with culture, developing ethical processes for dealing with artifacts, and building community—these were just some of the concepts that librarian and curator Kimberly Toney covered in her Nov. 12 talk, “More Than Land Acknowledgements: Place-Based Relationship Building with Indigenous Communities in the Northeast.”
Toney, who is Hassanamisco Nipmuc, Native people who have lived for generations throughout the Tatnuck watershed, serves as the inaugural coordinating curator of Native American and Indigenous Collections at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. The talk was co-sponsored by The Office of Multicultural Affairs, the Liberal and Interdisciplinary Studies Department, the Department of History and Political Science, Library Services, the Intercultural Student Alliance, and the Office of Inclusive Excellence & Belonging as part of Indigenous/Native American Heritage Month and was attended by more than 50 students, faculty, and staff.
Toney described how the theft of land and forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples by white colonizers started in the 1600s are only part of the problem today. Another is the long history of speaking about Native people in the past tense—something that continues today with some land acknowledgements.
Land acknowledgements—formal statements that recognize the Indigenous peoples who are the traditional stewards of the land on which an institution currently exists—often have problems, Toney said. They can also be inaccurate in the ways that they describe Indigenous communities today, reinforcing erasure and denying modernity to Native people by talking about communities in the past tense. They can also be performative when they’re not tied to commitment to community.
“But a good land acknowledgement can be a first step,” she said. “They can foreground reciprocal relationships, relationship building between communities and institutions, and they can be a call for accountability at an institutional level and be tied to actionable and sustainable commitments.”
Toney stressed that, as Nipmuc, she could not be the arbiter for all Indigenous people, so her goal is to engage the various tribal nations. She also made a distinction between “decolonization,” which involves the return of land and artifacts without any real learning or reflection, and “indigenization,” which involves tribal communities taking the lead on determining processes for restoration and healing.
An example of this is found in her work at Brown, where they are putting a research moratorium on items in the library collection that might contain culturally sensitive information such as ceremonial or other sacred rites that was published against the will of those tribal nations. “We do not allow research by anyone into those particular materials that we’ve identified,” she said, “until such a time that we engage with the tribal communities that are affiliated with that material, and they let us know how we should continue to steward that material. And in some cases, it might be a return of those things.”
This involvement of Native communities extends to other projects at the John Carter Brown Library, including a research fellowship for Indigenous community members. Fellows don’t have to be writing a dissertation, their letter of recommendation comes from tribal leadership, and the end result of the fellowship focuses on tribal needs. The library has also hosted tribal research nights where they open the library in the evening for tribe members—an event that has led to greater engagement with the library from the local Native community.
It’s something that has personal resonance for Toney. “I grew up in this very white space where not only was there not representation of people who look like me but not even representation of me and my histories in the classroom,” she said. “So it became really important for me to be in the library and to be connected to those resources and to seek them out because they’re there.”
“A lot of people feel like they’re in a space of reconnecting to culture and community,” she continued. That includes projects to revitalize the Nipmuc language, which she described as “not dead, but sleeping,” and to practice cultivation and animal husbandry techniques that are part of Nipmuc tradition.
That’s not to say there aren’t challenges. The Nipmuc community is still working to receive Federal recognition as a nation, and Toney recognizes that there may be challenges ahead. “All the things happening politically at any time,” she said, “are always a call for our communities to work together more closely and to organize better, and to become more deeply engaged.”
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