Libraries

[ysabetwordsmith]

Wellington Library trials new shelving system based on Māori deities

Under Tangaroa, atua of the oceans, lakes and rivers - and all life within them, and the guardian of knowledge of carving - you can find books on bodies of water, fish, art/the arts and carving.

Rongomatāne, atua of peace, the kūmara and cultivated food is where you find te ao Māori books on peace, agriculture, gardening, food and cooking.


All people categorize knowledge into batches, but they don't make the same batches. Indigenous languages, cultures, and ways of thinking will draw connections that other cultures just don't see and which make perfect sense within their own framework.

This is a replicable solution which can be deployed in any indigenous library or collection, where you have both a coherent framework and a large enough body of materials that need sorting. It will be easier to apply in tribal colleges or libraries where you also have an ample supply of cultural experts to help sort things. An indigenous librarian is ideal, but you can manage without one if needs must. Definitely consider having people, especially elders, write essays that explain "X belongs in Y because Z." This is also a terrific exercise for intermediate to advanced language learners: here is a pile of books, describe which category you would choose for each book and explain why.

Comments

*teary*

[gothfvck]

"With Dewey, a lot of non white peoples are in the end of the nine hundreds, because when they did it they thought they were going extinct"

You mean... I'm not a ghost or a fig-mint?

YOU GUYS ARE IN TROUBLE NOW >:D

Re: *teary*

[ysabetwordsmith]

Well, during the active phase of genocide, there was grounds to believe it would succeed that much.

I actually have a tribal ghost character in "A Great Many Evil Things."

[dorkbird]

Having things organized with an NDN Mindset is interesting. We need more of this!
#decolonize #indiginize

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Most indigenous people have oral traditions, and occasionally have written traditions, which are organized based on their own framework. This rarely translates well to the Dewey system. So then when those people want to look things up, they have to translate what they want into what the library can do. It discourages them from using the library.

Since we already have quite a lot of reservation libraries and tribal colleges -- in some cases, precisely because white libraries are out of reach or unsuitable -- these could easily be reorganized into tribal systems if people wished to do that.

For example, think how many tribes use the Three Sisters of corn, squash, and beans. So in a tribal system, these would be filed together. But standard botany and agriculture usually use one of two other methods -- alphabetical or phylogenetic -- neither of which preserves their relationship. Say you wanted to research how to recreate tribal methods of Three Sisters agriculture so you could study their results compared to conventional agriculture. In a tribal library, all that stuff would be together: those three plants, their cultural context, the effects they have on the soil, the nutrition of Three Sisters recipes, etc. But in a white library, all that would be scattered all over the building.

It's a whole different set of assumptions about what data people will commonly want to use together, thus is more efficient when stored together.

"Beautiful, Damn Hard, Increasingly Useful" just went up and it showed a different cultural framework for a library.