Donald E. Crabtree Lithic Technology Collection

CLIR-DHC: Advisory Board Interview Mandi Harris 1/11/2023

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:00:00): Thank you, everyone, for joining us. I’m really delighted to be here with Jylisa Kenyon and Mandi Harris, who’s our special guest today, discussing her role on our advisory board as part of our CLIR Crabtree grant. Uh Mandi and I got acquainted with each other at a library conference in, wow, 2019, I guess it must have been ‘cause the pandemic was not a thing. So that’s kind of the waypoint for that. Um and Mandi has had a lot of um really interesting uh and relevant, in my opinion, roles to this uh project. She was recently a librarian up in Coeur d’Alene and is now a graduate student um in the School of Information at University of Washington.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:00:38): Um so Mandi if you would um you know, first, I just wanted to say thank you for being here, for doing this with us. Um I feel like we got so lucky with our advisory board, and that definitely includes you and I’m very excited for um our collaborations on this, especially um as we start to think about our K through 12 outreach. Um I, I’m just so excited to have you as a collaborator and a partner on that. So thank you for agreeing to do this with us. Um before we dive into the questions, um we always just ask folks uh to do an introduction. You know, that can include uh your name, your role, any important affiliations that you’d like to share um with the audience before we dive in.

Mandi Harris (00:01:19): Right. [Transcription Needed 00:01:20], hello, my name is Mandi Harris. I’m an enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation. I’m currently a second year PhD student in the Information School at the University of Washington. I also got my MLIS from UW. I liked it so much I just had to go back and get my doctorate. Um and all of the connections that I made there made it a very welcoming place for me, along with its focus on Native North American and Indigenous Knowledge, the NNAIK program there.

Mandi Harris (00:01:48): And before that, prior to joining the UW, once again as a PhD student, I was the head of youth services for the Coeur d’Alene Public Library up here in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, which is where I am speaking to you from today. And I have worked in public libraries, in youth services for a little over a decade now or just coming up on — just coming up on a decade now, which is hard to believe. I love youth librarianship. I love being able to watch children and families learn and grow together, especially through books and through programming, and how a community can come together through the library.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:02:28): Awesome. Thank you, Mandi. Um thank you again for being here. And uh just for folks who are you know maybe tuning in, I think um it’s pretty cool that Mandi is our only graduate student on the panel, and so I’m — I’m really delighted to have someone with such um a diversity and depth of experience to bring to this, but who’s also um still very much sort of a, an up-and-comer into some of these, um, these relevant disciplines to the Crabtree Collection. So I, I think we’ve um, just — just as I said before, been tremendously blessed with a — a really great advisory board committee of both um very established and experienced researchers and then up-and-coming stars like Mandi. So thanks for taking some time out of your day to — to do this with us. And with that, I’ll take us into the first question, which is, what’s your perspective on the Crabtree Collection and other ones like it? Uh is it appropriative of Native cultures?

Mandi Harris (00:03:20): So I was thinking a lot about this and about appropriation. And to me, a more accurate word would be erasure. Erasure of Native cultures. So collections like Crabtree’s, they remove Indigenous art and science, and from my perspective, Indigenous art and science go hand in hand along with Indigenous knowledge and information organization. So it’s removing Indigenous art and science from its context. So I’m going to cite Cree scholar Shawn Wilson. So in the introduction to his book “Research Is Ceremony,” he states that, “Indigenous epistemology is all about ideas developing through the formation of relationship. An idea cannot be taken out of this relational context and still maintain its shape.” So that quote’s from Shawn Wilson, and I really was thinking a lot about this idea and how Crabtree’s Collection with the flintknapping — the flintknapping has been taken out of its relational context. So how can it still retain its shape?

Mandi Harris (00:04:16): And so it’s been deprived of its relationships. We don’t know who Crabtree learned from and what the cultural context was, the stories, the relationships, and the scientific and artistic knowledge there that had been held since time immemorial. Um so there was a cultural context that was lost around flintknapping when Crabtree became held up as one of the world’s best-known flintknap artists. And it’s a parallel to so much of the erasure that has happened of um Indigenous knowledge on the lands that are now known as the United States. And there’s a lot of room and [inaudible]… for grief here. And when we consider a collection like Crabtree’s, I think acknowledging that grief is very, very important.

Mandi Harris (00:05:01): And I, you told me that there were Native individuals who have learned flintknapping back from Crabtree. And so there’s these — these mixed emotions around Crabtree, um both the gratitude of being able to learn the skill back and then that loss, that appropriation and that erasure. And so I’m always grateful when people can reengage with art. And I have several friends who have reconnected with their cultures as adults through learning bead work. And it’s something that I, myself, as an adult have connected and reconnected through bead work. Um but we, I — I always like to ask myself questions, and so why is there the need to relearn? Um and especially, why is there the need to, for an Indigenous person to relearn a skill from a non-Native person? And so whose,

Mandi Harris (00:05:45): I’m just going to answer your question with more questions. Uh whose names do we know? Whose names do we not know? And whose stories, especially as a librarian, whose stories do we know and whose stories do we not? Whose stories are being told? And so, since libraries are responsible for archiving this information, and when cataloging, we — we look at the metadata, and part of that metadata is, who’s the creator? You know, you’re going to fill in the field of who’s the creator. And so when we call this the Crabtree Collection, he’s sensibly the creator of the individual objects, but is that truly accurate? And so whose names, whose knowledges are being left out of this metadata?

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:06:27): Thank you, Mandi. That is, that is such a great and thoughtful response and I think resonates with so many things um you know that Jylisa and I have thought about and talked about and that we’ve heard about in the other interviews as well. Some of the things that came to my mind when — when you were speaking on that was thinking about, um actually, Andy Warhol sort of occurred to me because of his interest in the sort of the — the surface of things, the sort of superficialness of things. And I was thinking about, you’re saying you know taking something out of context, you end up with just um what in Buddhism we call like the form or like the vessel, right and it’s like, what is the meaning? It’s kind of like, it’s — it’s taken out, it’s an erasure and

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:07:05): so I — I think that that’s um, that void, it is — it is painful like from a Native perspective. And I — I really appreciate you specifically naming grief um because that’s something that, you know to be honest, in this project, I felt sort of like, you know I feel sad about these rocks, especially the ones that have a — a Native provenance, and the — the sort of pain of knowing they’re in the collection that we don’t have a good way to re-provenance them. Um and there’s a, ya know, a sort of colonial perspective I guess, that’s like, “Oh, you know, it’s good, they’re in a museum and they’re being preserved” and you know all this kind of stuff, but it’s like at that sort of intuitive level of — of the loss and, and what it — what it represents and how it connects to that and um

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:07:49): I think Jylisa and I have talked in some of these interviews about sort of getting a handle on this collection by understanding Crabtree as — as an artist, but as one who erases all of these other creators when he’s held up as the definitive, as the only, um even when all of these things that are more his belongings, he becomes the quasi creator of right? There’s an almost sort of like, everything he can see becomes his, right? And it’s like, oh, isn’t that sort of that colonial perspective manifest here?

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:08:22): And I don’t, we don’t know Crabtree, and I — I personally don’t know his perspectives well enough to say that that was ever his intention with this. I think this is more what we have to reckon with as librarians and archivists and anthropologists when we talk about these collections and how we situate them and how we frame them and how do we talk about the incredible technical expertise or artistic expertise while also acknowledging the erasure and the grief, and making sure that we don’t lose the nuance and the complication of the original creators and practitioners of these arts. So yeah, tons, tons to think about and go off of there. Uh Jylisa, do you want to take us into number two?

Jylisa Kenyon (00:09:02): Sure. Yeah. Um Mandi, your comments in the — in the prior question, I think, lead into this one really well, um and especially because all three of us here are librarians and have that type of background uh, do you think folks digitizing digital collections who are not anthropologists should take up this type of contextualizing work? If so, how can we be successful without causing further harm?

Mandi Harris (00:09:27): Well, the history of anthropologists engaging with Native communities is — is filled with harm, so this work should not be left solely to anthropologists. Museums still hold on to the physical remains of our Indigenous ancestors, human bodies, human bodies that were stolen by anthropologists and archeologists for the sake of building careers and filling museums. And Indigenous nations are struggling and fighting for the return of our ancestors. And so I was thinking um a lot about things that I’ve been reading recently. And um the University of Toronto has an Indigenous rematriation advisor, and um she’s currently seeking the rightful owners of a 40,000 artifact collection. And so if we place people into these roles, then it doesn’t necessarily prevent harm or repair the harms, but it can be a step towards responsibility. And so I was really inspired by that Indigenous rematriation advisor, and I especially appreciate the word rematriate rather than repatriate because I think that there’s so much power when you choose a term like rematriate. Um and so,

Mandi Harris (00:10:41): also, I was thinking a lot about the, I guess I think a lot about these things. I keep using that phrase. I was thinking a lot about this. And so um the quote, there’s a quote by Maori researcher Linda Smith who wrote “Decolonizing Methodologies.” And so she talks about, in Indigenous communities, and this is her direct quote, quote “research was talked about both in terms of its absolute worthlessness to us, the Indigenous world, and its absolute usefulness to those who wielded it as an instrument.” End quote. And so its, you know, its uselessness, its worthlessness to the Indigenous world, but its usefulness to those who wielded it as an instrument, and those would be the anthropologists. And not just the anthropologists, but the very institutions that those anthropologists were employed by and who they were paid by and who they represented.

Mandi Harris (00:11:31): And so it’s — it’s very interesting here because collections like this, they go into building up the university’s reputation, uh the — the researcher’s reputation. And so it’s very important to be mindful, especially I think that quote by Linda Smith. And remembering the harms of history, the harms of research, and the very real reasons behind institutional mistrust. And so thinking about not causing further harm, I don’t know if it’s actually possible. As imperfect human beings in an imperfect world, every single one of us who are existing here in the United States we’re growing up under capitalism, under colonialism, under white supremacy, and we have internalized all of those things. And it is a constant journey, a constant iterative, reflexive journey to unlearn those things that we have been deliberately taught in order to function in what is now known as the United States.

Mandi Harris (00:12:35): And so um there was a fabulous book that came out in 2022, and it was called “Weaving an Otherwise,” and um “Weaving an Otherwise: In-Relations Methodological Practice,” um an absolutely fantastic book by um Tachine and Zaro. And there’s a quote from the forward in it by Lee Patel, and it says, I love this quote so I’m gonna, again, I have all these quotes. I’m going to quote ‘em directly. Here we go. So the quote is, “In striving for knowledge practices that create liberation while tearing down hierarchy, we will make mistakes.” And so I don’t know if it’s possible to not cause further harm. In fact, I have another quote, but this is from a friend of mine, uh Tully O’Leary. She’s Cheyenne River Sioux and last year, last June, I was about to present at a conference. I had written a paper on Indigenous picture books, and I told Tully I was so nervous. I was like, “What if I haven’t read enough? What if somebody rips my paper to shreds — to shreds and says, ‘Well, this is wrong because you didn’t read so-and-so and you didn’t cite so-and-so and here’s how your whole paper’s wrong?’”

Mandi Harris (00:13:42): And I was so scared of that, that I didn’t know how it was possible to read everything that I needed to read to have this full understanding. And Tully just said, “Well, then you’ll know more than you did before, won’t you?” And I really loved that because I was so afraid I wanted to do — to do right by my advisors, to do right by my university, to do right by uh my tribe, to do right by those people I was representing. Um but Tully reminded me that correction is caring. So if in doing this work you are corrected by the Native peoples you are working with, then listening, understanding, and accountability that’s how you improve and that’s how you mitigate those harms. So reflexes, reflexivity is necessary, as is slowing down, um building reflexivity and slowness into your work. And so taking the time to ask these very important questions of, how will you mitigate the harm? And then how will you repair the relationships and show responsibility and reciprocity once you have caused harm, whether intentionally or unintentionally. And I doubt you would do it intentionally. It’s most often unintentionally.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:14:55): Thank you, Mandi. Um I’m wondering if you would expand a little bit on the rematriation versus repatriation. I think that you know maybe, you shared this article with us and then I, you know I shared it with Jylisa and we made sure to share it with our team, so like everyone in this room kind of knows the reference point there. But just — just to sort of catch the — the viewer who doesn’t know, would you — would you mind just maybe capping that kind of briefly, you know, sort of what resonated for you there? And um I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard of rematriation, I’ll be honest. So I — I found it great, um but am — am excited to learn more.

Mandi Harris (00:15:31): Yes. So repatriation is the term that we’re — we’re used to, and it has that Latin root right in the middle of that, meaning father, and rematriation is the feminine, I guess you would say feminine version of it. But that’s a very shallow, that’s just going by like parsing the words there and looking at the Latin roots. But what it really means is, rematriation is Indigenous women led. And it’s, but usually, repatriate means to return to an owner, would be the definition that I would give, return to an owner. But rematriate implies a caretaking responsibility. It’s and, um my friend [Transcription needed 00:16:14], he’s [Transcription needed 00:16:16], uh he and I talk about this a lot. Because when we’re talking about data and things like that, and we’re tempted to use the word ownership, but that’s really antithetical to Indigenous knowledges. We don’t want to use the word ownership. It’s about caretaking.

Mandi Harris (00:16:31): So rematriation is not about returning it to its rightful owners, it’s returning something to its rightful caretakers, those who have a long existing relationship with the land, with the — with the more than animal, or more, sorry more than human relatives with our more than human plant and animal relatives. And so it’s rematriation rather than repatriation. Rematriation is based on relationships, about responsibility, about reciprocity. And I’ll keep using these words over and over again, these — these rematriation, reciprocity, responsibility, reflexivity, um respect. And so yeah, that’s — that’s my uh little spiel on rematriate.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:17:19): Thank you, Mandi. That is — that is great. And I’m sure that we’ll, we’ll probably have some links or something for folks who are actually viewing this live on the website, but that — that is great and so helpful and um I could ask you a million things about that, but we’re going to stay on track here. So um question number three, um this relates but also maybe takes us into some new directions too, uh what makes a digital effort like this a good partner to Native nations and people?

Mandi Harris (00:17:43): Yes, and I will say my first note to myself on this one is, it’s all about respect, relationships, and reciprocity. So there again, I am talking once again about respect, relationships, and reciprocity. But it’s, how are we accountable and who are we accountable to? So in my case, I take my accountability to my tribe, to my family, to my community. I hold that with reverence. I hold reverence for other Indigenous peoples, and especially the Indigenous patrons that I encounter through my work, as we go through the process of indigenizing library collections and library programming.

Mandi Harris (00:18:23): So who are you accountable to in this project? So on paper, you’re accountable to your institution and to your grant funders, but in reality, when looking at the full scope of this project and the history behind it, you’re accountable to Indigenous peoples, to sovereign nations, to ancestors, to the future. You have a responsibility and accountability to all of those, including and especially those whose lands you’re on, and those whose lands Crabtree was on when he learned those skills.

Mandi Harris (00:18:53): And so I had one more point. Um it’s also about respecting um sovereignty, and that includes epistemic sovereignty and data sovereignty. So epistemic sovereignty is really the right of an Indigenous community to determine for themselves what knowledge gets shared outside their community. And so not all knowledge is meant or should be widely distributed. Some knowledge needs to be maintained within the community and so a project like this needs to incorporate an understanding of epistemic sovereignty and allowing Indigenous communities to determine for themselves what is shared.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:19:35): Mandi, I’m gonna — I’m gonna go off script and ask you a question here. You can feel free to pass ‘cause I know you haven’t had time to consider it. But I’m wondering, what do you think about um talking to non-Native people about work with ancestors in mind? You know, I — I never want to say that because I worry that it’ll come across like, “Hey, here’s a great opportunity to work off some things you might feel guilty about,” or something like that, you know? But I feel like sometimes it’s like, in thinking of, this has been such a recurring theme in these interviews right? Like everyone is saying unique and profound and different things, but this commonality, the reciprocity, the relationships, the accountability, how do you explain those to, to people who don’t have any kind of reference point for that or who may be um the ancestral connection here is to the settler side of it?

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:20:24): Like what, like if one of our students was here, you know our students are hopefully gonna watch this video, and so if they’re wondering that, I — I feel like I partly ask you this and feel like I can ask you on the fly because of your experience as a children and youth librarian, like how do you translate some of this sort of um high level conceptual thinking about this into the sort of ‘where the rubber meets the road,’ you know? People working on this project are encountering it who aren’t Native, you know how — how do they start those processes or what does that look like? What would you say?

Mandi Harris (00:20:53): Yes. In — in fact, this is, oh Mandi, I was about to use that phrase. There’s certain phrases we have to work out of our vocabulary. I was about to say, I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I think a lot about this. Um man, I guess I’m more of an introvert than I thought. And I just…

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:21:06): Or — or you’re in the perfect career path. This is, we’re in the right spot to be people who think a lot. It’s what we do.

Mandi Harris (00:21:12): I read a lot and then I think about what I read. Maybe I should be a librarian. Um but, so I have been, uh we’re about to start our second round of a course called Indigenous Idaho. It’s, I’ve been contracted by the Idaho Commission for Libraries. And it’s a three-part, self-paced course in which we go through — we go through, I call it future, past, and present. So we start with the history, and then we move into the present, and then we talk about where libraries can go in the future about um Indigenizing their collections and Indigenizing their programming and we talk about things like Indigenous science and Indigenous artists you can bring in, Indigenous ways of knowing, uh traditional ecological knowledge, all of these things you can bring into your library.

Mandi Harris (00:21:54): Uh but a lot of the non-Native participants, and it’s mostly non-Native participants, although we do have Native participants as well, they ask me about this because as they’re — they’re discovering things uh through this course that they didn’t know about, because they weren’t taught that because curriculum goes a long way in creating the types of the citizens that the government would like to have. And so erasure of Indigenous history from these lands goes a long way towards fulfilling what used to be known as manifest destiny.

Mandi Harris (00:22:30): Um and so we’ve talked a lot about this, but also, I’m not exempt from this. I am an enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation, and I also have a uh mixed European background. I know far less about my European ancestors than I do about my Cherokee ancestors. The stories of um being Cherokee and our heritage and our language was very present when I was a kid growing up, more so than um a lot of my uh stories of our European ancestors. It’s very nebulous. It’s very, very nebulous. I don’t know. But then again, that also goes toward, that was intentional of having people who immigrated to form a new cultural identity to the US. And so one practice that I did, oh and then I also, the Cherokee enslaved people, and we um have the Cherokee Freedmen, and that’s a step towards repairing the harms that the Cherokees inflicted on the past when they enslaved human beings. And so that is a harm of my Indigenous ancestors that I have to um acknowledge and reckon with, and to be in good relation with my Afro-Indigenous relatives. And so one practice that I did was, and I — I can’t recall where I came across this practice, but I wrote a journal, um just grabbed some paper, and I, the practice had you write down the harms that your ancestors endured, all that you could think of, all you could possibly think of. So I know that on my mixed European side, I do have um Irish ancestors who immigrated during the famine and so I wrote about that. But then it also had you write about the harms they themselves inflicted. And so we can then begin to see our ancestors not as these remote faraway people, but human beings existing in a world who both endured harms and harmed others themselves.

Mandi Harris (00:24:28): And so I don’t have, you know, the perfect answer to how people can engage with the harms that their ancestors caused. But I do think by thinking about our ancestors as very real human beings who existed and thinking consciously about the harms that they caused, but then bringing it into the present. What systems, what behaviors, what patterns am I participating in now that parallel those that my ancestors participated in in the past?

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:25:00): Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, I think that’s very powerful, Mandi. Thank you for — for sharing that and thank you for sharing that on the fly. I think you — you described a very pragmatic sort of practice of accountability there right? And you know I would say, I would argue that what you described there is that practice of accountability to yourself, your immediate living community, but then also your broader ancestral community, known and unknown. Um so I — I think that’s very powerful for — for listeners. So thank you. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you for — for vibing with me on the fly with that one. I — I really appreciate it. If you do have any resources or anything that you think of later, of course we can include those in the notes for this so.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:25:35): Okay, Jylisa, I think — I think you’re up right with question four, if I’m remembering questions right. Okay, I’m going to turn it back over to you.

Jylisa Kenyon (00:25:42): Yes. Did you have anything else, Mandi?

Mandi Harris (00:25:45): Oh, just that I do have links and resources that I will share.

Jylisa Kenyon (00:25:48): Okay, awesome.

Mandi Harris (00:25:49): There’s currently um an exhibit, uh the Cherokee Nation has an exhibit on the Cherokee Freedmen, um and so I’m hoping to get down and see it. So I’ll probably share a link on that because I think that’s an important part of our history, and we owe so much to our Freedmen relatives, and we have a long way um uh to go as a nation to repair those harms.

Jylisa Kenyon (00:26:08): Awesome. Thank you for sharing those. I’m excited to have them available alongside your interview.

Jylisa Kenyon (00:26:13): Okay. So question four, from your perspective, what should people know about flintknapping to understand the art and practice in a way that doesn’t center this one non-Native person?

Mandi Harris (00:26:26): So I am not a flintknapper, and I’m not the person that you should consult when it comes to flintknapping. So I was reframing this question in a way where I could offer some sort of uh wisdom or knowledge. And so one thing is the conceptual model of Indigenous ways of knowing, and that is from Sandy Littletree, Miranda Belarde-Lewis, and Marisa Duarte’s paper “Centering Relationality.” And it’s this gorgeous, gorgeous conceptual model. And so in the conceptual model of Indigenous ways of knowing, Indigenous ways of knowing are verbs. So listening, observing, praying, dancing, story work, it’s action, it’s verbs. And so even relationships, relationship is a verb. Um love, relationship is a noun, but enacting and being in good relationship is a verb. And those, it’s, relationship is built on actions and it’s built on verbs. And the same with love and the same with respect.

Mandi Harris (00:27:27): So those Indigenous ways of knowing are verbs. We’re constantly in action, which I think helps hold us ourselves to responsibility because we’re responsible for our actions and for our behavior. But then from there, the next outer ring are the expressions of Indigenous ways of knowing. And so these are those nouns, these are those objects such as carving or pottery or art. Those are expressions of Indigenous ways of knowing. So when you consider flintknapping from that, it cannot be removed from Indigenous ways of knowing because it is an expression of that. And in the conceptual model, it’s these gorgeous concentric rings, and they’re all energized from the relationality at the core. And so they’re concentric rings, but they’re not solid lines, they’re dashed lines so that energy can flow out and everything’s related. So when you have the expression of Indigenous ways of knowing as an outer ring to Indigenous ways of knowing, the two cannot be separated.

Mandi Harris (00:28:30): And so I think what happens in a collection like the Crabtree Collection is, it’s an intent, an attempt at removing an expression of Indigenous ways of knowing from the Indigenous ways of knowing. And so that is my perspective on how to not center one non-Native person. And so even though Crabtree has been centered in this, it’s — it’s almost impossible to remove the Indigeneity from this. And it’s not been lost because lost implies um a certain amount of fault on the person who loses something. So if I lose my glasses constantly right, I lose my glasses constantly, or um I’ll — I’ll have one pair and put on a second pair over like, I’ll just lose them constantly. That’s my responsibility of losing my glasses. And so I don’t like the word lost when it comes to Indigenous knowledges. They were not lost by the peoples who carried those knowledges, who were the caretakers of them. They were deliberately stolen and they were erased, or a great word is hidden, because when something has been hidden, you can unhide it.

Mandi Harris (00:29:44): And so I think the process and the goal of this project is to unhide that which was deliberately hidden. And I’m not saying Crabtree deliberately hid it. Sometimes people are just products of their time, of their, of their perspective, and of uh what happens when you um become the top of your field. Uh it carries with it a certain amount of um behavioral influence. And so even though, and it’s something that you know I reflect on, is how am I moving through the world in a way that’s responsible and I’m not being you know influenced to act in ways that don’t keep me in good relationship and good standing?

Jylisa Kenyon (00:30:28): Yeah. Thanks for — thanks for talking about that, Mandi, and kind of the differences between lost, stolen, hidden is something that um Marco and I have talked a lot about, especially in relation to um the items in the, in the collection that do have Native and Indigenous provenance, is that in anthropology, those items are often referred to as lost if — if they do not know what the provenance is. And that kind of really raised um you know Marco’s and my um like hackles a little bit. It’s like, well, they’re not lost, they were literally taken from someone or from somewhere and added to this collection. And yeah and so the difference in — in the use of the words we use to talk about it, I think, is really important for uh this project and for — for other listeners who are working on similar types of projects.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:31:19): Yeah, it, it also makes me think about um, you know Mandi, you mentioned that you’re learning bead work, um you know, and the ways that what we might term like reconnecting Natives or connecting Natives or seeking out um, you know, traditional or other sort of time since immemorial activities to — to culturally reconnect. Um and I’ve learned uh Columbia Plateau basket weaving, even though that’s not my cultural ancestry, but that’s where, you know, we’re here in Moscow, and um I went to a basket making workshop, and I absolutely loved it. And I’ve learned from Leanne Campbell, who’s a very accomplished Native basket maker. And — and I was asking her in a — a recent class, ‘cause she was saying that it was okay for us to kind of emulate different patterns that we saw or copy different patterns and this, the — the group was primarily Columbia Plateau-affiliated people in some way, and I was like, ya know, “Does this still apply for someone like me who this is not my — my heritage?”

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:32:15): And I really appreciated what she said, which is like, “Yeah, you know you’re — you’re — you’re free to emulate these patterns. One of the things about Columbia Plateau baskets in particular is, a lot of tribes share patterns and motifs. So it’s, there’s not so much um you know super culturally specific things for one tribe. And so it’s like, if you’re emulating this style, you know it’s okay to do these things.” But one of the things she said to me is, she’s like, “You would just want to make sure on your basket that you put that I was your teacher.” And I was like, “Oh, of course, like, of course.” She’s like, “You should make sure to put your name on it.” And you know, there’s this sort of like western way of thinking that’s like, “Well, I shouldn’t put my name on it cause I’m just like, you know I’m, I’m nobody here. I don’t have a claim to this. I shouldn’t.” But it’s like, it gets back to what you’re saying like, “Putting my name on it is not a way of owning it. It’s a way of showing my responsibility for the knowledge transfer.”

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:33:06): And it — it was like the first time I got that at an experiential level ‘cause I was like, right, what’s important here is that Leanne has taught me a traditional way of doing this. And if I do this practice in the way that’s faithful to the way that I’ve taught her, I’m responsible for some knowledge that I transfer and can share. But I also need to be very careful with my provenancing so that I don’t accidentally, you know, do accidentally make a knockoff basket and then I give it to someone and then it’s out there and there’s not a clear provenance to it. And um that’s one of the things where the — the time period that Crabtree was in was different and um infrastructurally and institutionally racist in a time that where Indian extinction was sort of the popular motif.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:33:51): But we wish, you know, you can’t help but wish that he had had that more Native way, that Native-informed view of the knowledge because it would be so nice to be able to say, “Oh, he learned these techniques from this place,” or if these amazing notes that he had included more about the people that he learned from, or even the materials um and their sort of cultural context, you know? So I — I think that um just sort of a long kind of sidewind there, but to kind of just say where that was making me think and sort of bring up some of those elements in the way that we see that even now in — in people learning these — these skills.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:34:28): Okay, question five is where we’re at now, right? Okay. One of the topics we’ve discussed as part of this grant project is the relationship between experimental archeology, amateur archeology, and cultural, as well as knowledge appropriation and erasure. Um can you talk a bit about what you see as the relationship between those concepts?

Mandi Harris (00:34:50): Yes. And I, for me, it’s all about questions and being interrogative. So again, it’s who is telling the story? And also looking at it, is it caretaking or are you treating this as a resource? And I can’t remember, I’m a terrible librarian, but I recently, this just came to me just now as I was thinking ‘cause I was about to, I can’t cite the article, but it’s um people digging up uh in their backyards finding, uh both here in the US and there was also an example in the UK, of people excavating, you know um, Roman sites in the UK just in their backyard. And then here, the same thing, excavating, um but this, but not taking it as caretaking, taking it as um a resource, but also a hobby, uh something fun. And rather than caretaking this very sacred history and recognizing also how did I come to be on this land where this history is here. And so, and then it also lends itself to who is telling the story. Um so with experimental archeology and amateur archeology. And then also with knowledge appropriation, who is telling the story?

Mandi Harris (00:36:07): And is the story or the physical expressions of knowledge in that story, part of that story, is that treated as a resource, a commodity, or is it caretaking? Is it part of a relationship, a responsible reciprocal relationship? And also, and I know I mentioned this before about epistemic sovereignty, but not all information is meant to be shared. It’s as simple as that. And once something is out there, and I take this very, very seriously, somebody asked me to come on their podcast and tell Cherokee stories. Um A.) I’m, I don’t — I don’t see that I have enough knowledge to be a storyteller on a podcast. And also the responsibility in that, um what if I accidentally, without meaning to or without knowing enough, told something that wasn’t meant to be shared outside our community on a podcast? I could never get that back. I could never draw back in that information that needs to be held in a culturally specific context and had been shared outside its meaningful context and so I declined uh that invitation.

Mandi Harris (00:37:19): And so just to remember that not all information is meant to be shared. And — and perhaps even when you come across information, you can choose not to pass it along or you can choose to pass it along as you find it, as you see fit. And I really think that’s an important consideration. So much of Indigenous knowledge is an important consideration in the 21st century because everything is about speed and the rapid, rapid transfer of information. Like with a click of a button, you can share things regardless of whether it’s true or false or should be shared. And so bringing that into not just the topics we’re discussing, but our everyday lives, our everyday data-driven, information-driven lives, considering these parameters that have been put on information. I think it’s something really important to consider about slowing down and thinking of the harms that can come from sharing things that aren’t meant to be shared.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:38:22): Yeah. Something that um resonates with… uh for me with that, Mandi, is thinking about like, uh, like — like GIS data in phones and the way that’s led to increases in looting and um degradation of just sacred sites in general you know and so, you know I — I think it’s really important to, for people to do just what you’re saying to sort of interrogate um how a — a colonial or anti-Indigenous perspective can crop up in so many facets of — of an ordinary data-filled life you know? And so it’s like um, I’m thinking of down by the Snake River by Lewiston there’s some really amazing petroglyphs at a place that I’m not going to name on here right now actually right? And the reason why is because it’s kind of a small site, it can’t really support this number of people visiting it if, for some reason, it were to blow up on Instagram, so to speak you know? And so I think people um coming back to these sort of concepts of like responsibility, you know, part of that includes understanding the sort of metadata trail and the broader context that everything’s in.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:39:26): And so um, lots, lots for people I think to think about here, both on a personal level and then also to think about um you know, libraries, I feel like we, sort of, we view our metadata in an agnostic way, or it’s one of those places where I think we like to think of the library as neutral, um even as we interrogate the ways in which the library is not neutral. And um you know, we, for instance, have had a lot of questions about like, is it better to share Native belongings on this site in the hopes that they could get repatriated or rematriated in an ideal world, you know? Or are we really just sort of doing a gloss there where we know that’s not really going to happen and instead are just saying, “Well, these things are stolen and so now we get to do what we want with them because they were lost” you know? And so that’s,

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:40:10): And — and I do think, for the audience, we should be clear that a lot of our conversation here has centered more on the Native belongings in the Crabtree Collection as opposed to the things that he created himself, at least in terms of these like repatriation discussions. So just in case, this is the first interview someone just landed on the website, and this is the first page they’ve seen, um this collection is about 90% things that Crabtree created based on techniques he emulated and then invented himself. And then about 10% of it is stuff that was bequeathed to him or that he collected in what we would now term looting, unfortunately, at the time what was considered a common practice of surface collection of points.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:40:52): Okay. So with that, I think, Jylisa, is it time for question six?

Jylisa Kenyon (00:40:55): It is.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:40:56): Okay.

Jylisa Kenyon (00:40:57): Uh what legacy do you think people like Crabtree had on how we present Indigenous histories and topics to children and youth in literature and K through 12 materials? How is the academy, as a whole, part of that process?

Mandi Harris (00:41:13): So it all comes down to erasure and the fact that knowledge about Native peoples has been filtered through non-Native, most often white perspectives. And this has resulted in harmful portrayals and stereotypes. And you can see this um, Debbie Reese, on her blog “American Indians in Children’s Literature,” has this timeline of portrayals of Native peoples in picture books. And it shows the indoctrination of children that happened throughout the history of picture books in the United States and how children who are non-Native think of Natives and how that harm that causes Native children to think of themselves. And I am so grateful to be living in a time where we have all of these incredible picture book creators um who are Native. So there’s Traci Sorell, there’s Julie Flett, um there are so many. I’m going to mention Art Coulson later. There are so many, too many to name. And I really, really geek out on Indigenous picture books. Uh we’re living in this time where we can have authentic representations of Natives in books created by Native authors and illustrators. And so we’re taking a step back against that erasure that has happened.

Mandi Harris (00:42:44): And a lot of, so uh people like Crabtree, the influence that they have had on how we present Indigenous histories and topics to children and youth, I’m going to focus on that word history because that’s how Indigenous peoples are portrayed, as antiquated relics of a long by past. It’s very, it’s romanticized. It’s um an erasure of the horrific violence that was inflicted on Indigenous peoples as part of a genocide. And so, Indigenous peoples are presented as historical peoples rather than very real peoples in 2023 who are part of Indigenous continuity. So Indigenous continuity is the fact that I am a link for my Indigenous ancestors to an Indigenous future, so that we will, we were here in the past, we’re here in the present, and we will be here in the future. Indigenous futurity is real.

Mandi Harris (00:43:41): And, so I’ll go back again so it goes back to the “who is telling the story.” And we now have room in our libraries and are gonna take up more space. It’s gonna be generative, and we’re gonna occupy more space on shelves, in collections, in metadata, and determine for ourselves um how we’re cataloged and how that metadata is reported and what type of knowledge organization is occurring there. And, but it’s so similar to the land because it’s about erasing Indigenous people so you can lay claim to resources.

Mandi Harris (00:44:15): And there are all of these parallels because we’re not separate from the land, we’re in relationship with the land. Um and it’s about remembering all land in what is now known as the US and numerous other countries I could name but don’t have time to. All land in what is — in what is now the US is Indigenous land. And this includes the universities that exist on that land. Many of whom are land-grant universities that were given this land that was taken from Indigenous people. So institutions such as libraries and such as universities have to remember that they too occupy stolen lands, stolen Indigenous lands, and lands that people were violently displaced from.

Mandi Harris (00:45:00): And another aspect I think of in picture books, one that I think on a lot and I talk on a lot, is um how beautiful it is to show Indigenous continuity and futurity in picture books. When you consider the Sixties Scoop, when you consider the residential schools, when you consider the forced sterilization of Native women that happened in the 20th century where they estimate, um I think the smallest estimation I’ve seen is 25% of Native women were forcibly sterilized in the 20th century. And so then you have this, this future happening through children’s education and K-12 materials. It is a gloriously beautiful thing to open up a picture book and see a Native child with a Native grandparent or with a Native auntie or with a Native parent. And to show that despite those attempts, Indigenous children are here and we owe responsibility to them. And so that Indigenous futurity will continue.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:46:05): Thank you, Mandi. I think um well said and a lot to think about in there. Uh I’m the manager of the Gary Strong Curriculum Center, and one of the things that we prioritized over there since I got there was, we had a collection there, it’s sort of like Lewis and Clark and then a Native collection. And the Native collection was more books about Native people, including a lot of the ones that um like Dr. Reese has specifically cited as having problematic portrayals. And so that’s one of the priorities that I established, is changing that collection to a — a Native Voices, so Native authors, Native illustrators. Um and it’s — it’s — it’s really great just to hear you talk about this because, in some ways, you know, coming into this project, I’ve had this digitization experience. But you know, it’s like, Jylisa’s the sociology librarian, and actually neither of us are like our digital infrastructure librarians who you might think of on — on a project like this.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:46:56): But to me, the kind of connection was like, well, of course, if the library would take up establishing a Native Voices collection, we should be equally sort of cognizant of the possibilities in something like this where if the library’s going to take up this project and present it and promote it, do we tell the same story the way it’s been told over and over? And I feel like those kind of counter-story strategies um that we employ in history or even in looking at youth and kids lit and saying like, “Look, this is the mainstream sort of dominant narrative that people get a lot of exposure to in mainstream curriculums.” And it — it really kind of hits main history points from a few narrow perspectives and then kind of moves on, and there’s a lot more nuance to it.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:47:42): So um that’s, that really, to me, has been kind of the, the beating heart of some of my efforts on this project, which is just like, how do we bring that same spirit of nuance and counter-story and awareness of the library’s responsibility as a land-grant on unceded land? Um what is our responsibility in not um just sort of um re-perpetuating those old tired narratives about Native people and their erasure, um the historicization of Native people? What’s, how do we intervene? How do we provide an intervention in that and not keep sort of that up?

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:48:17): So um again, kind of rambling there, but I think lots of — lots of great points that you made there for people to think about and lots of connections um and a way for librarians to think expansively, you know? I think sometimes we sort of have gender and other kind of silos that happen in how we think about technology in libraries, and children’s librarians as maybe less technology or, you know or, you know whatever. It’s like, no, we need all of these kinds of perspectives, especially those kind of counter-stories and — and nuanced perspectives to come in.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:48:46): Um so with that, I think we’re at question seven, which is our last one and kind of a nice dovetail to what I just said, which is, what outreach would you like to see from this project towards um K through 12 settings specifically?

Mandi Harris (00:49:00): I would love to see Indigenous-created, Indigenous-led curricula. And there are examples to follow, including right here in Idaho, the Kessler Keener Foundation, and I’ll provide links to everything that I’ve mentioned, like the librarian I am. But the Kessler Keener Foundation has this program called Native Voices in Idaho. They wrapped up uh phase one of it. And what’s really great about this is, it requires a training first, um teachers have to watch a video and go through a training on how to use the curriculum. There are lesson plans, there are guides, there are videos from Native peoples in Idaho talking about the curricula. And so they could even be a potential partner to reach out to because they’re now moving on to phase two, the next phase of the program. And it’s free to educators. So I really love this because it’s accessible to all, um any educator who would like to use it, but it is Indigenous-led and created and from an Indigenous perspective. And there are all of these lesson plans. We know our teachers are so busy and they’re, they work so hard. And so these lesson plans are right there, and they’re authentic, which is very, very important.

Mandi Harris (00:50:10): And another example that I really love also is “Lessons from the Earth and Beyond” and it was created by Juan Carlos Chavez, and its subtitle is “Bringing Indigenous Knowledge Systems into the Classroom.” And this one is great. It talks about cognitive imperialism, which is an imperialism of the mind. So we — we talk about imperialism that happened on the land and with resources and with um taking land, but imperialism happened in the mind too. We’ve touched on this with um the inaccurate portrayals that happened in the past in — in schools, and were very, very deliberate, that deliberate erasure that happened through education and through books and through educational institutions. And so we can begin to push back against that cognitive imperialism that happens through resources like this.

Mandi Harris (00:50:57): And so um “Lessons from the Earth and Beyond,” it’s an absolutely gorgeous website with art — art, artwork by Christi Belcourt on it, just gorgeous art. And it has curricula that is divided from, there’s K-3, 4-6, and 7-10, so kindergarten through third, fourth through sixth, seventh through 10th. And it uh, there’s lessons from the Earth, which is all about the land. There’s lessons from the water, and there’s lessons from the sky. So, and it’s all based around stories. And these are from um different cultures. So there’s uh Navajo stories, there are Māori stories, and they’ve been pulled from uh stories that are able to be shared. And so it all begins with the story, these stories that have been passed down since time immemorial. But it recognizes one of my favorite things, that within Indigenous stories is Indigenous science. And so it takes these stories and then there are STEM lessons from those stories.

Mandi Harris (00:51:55): And it’s so cool because we can’t really separate this flintknapping work from the stories and from the, the science. It’s artwork and it’s science. And so um “Lessons from the Earth and Beyond” uh, offer a very interesting parallel for this because it shows the STEM that is inherent within Indigenous story work. And there’s um also really fantastic examples of picture books that incorporate Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous, uh, Indigenous present, Indigenous modernity, uh into books while also teaching kids STEM.

Mandi Harris (00:52:28): So Charlesbridge Publishing has their storytelling math series, and it’s um culturally specific. It teaches math in culturally specific ways um to all kiddos. And so kids from different cultures can see themselves represented, and all children can learn math from these books. Um so we have a really fantastic example of mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. As Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop said um, “books can serve as mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors.” So we have this available for kids. And one example is Art Coulson, who’s Cherokee, he wrote “Ni, Elisi! Look, Grandma!” And it teaches volume.

Mandi Harris (00:53:07): So these are not, I should also say, these books by Charlesbridge Publishing, the storytelling math, they’re not just one, two, three, or look at the patterns. They’re complex mathematical concepts that I learned from. Um so this one uh, “Look, Grandma!,” teaches volume by telling about a little boy who wants to sell marbles at Cherokee National Holiday. He wants to sell traditional Cherokee marbles at Cherokee National Holiday. And he can’t find the right container to hold all of these marbles in a way that everybody can see them, and they won’t spill when somebody pulls out one. So it’s culturally specific to Cherokee peoples, but teaches volume in an accessible way for all.

Mandi Harris (00:53:49): And there are lots of studies going on um about how Indigenous science, technology, engineering, and math provides these culturally specific knowledge that can teach everyone all of these very complex um knowledges and skills and information. And I think that’s one thing I get very, that erasure, uh that cognitive imperialism that happened, so much has been deprived from so many on math skills, engineering skills because it was deemed less than, rather than seen for the intricate, intricate knowledge that had been passed down through scientific observation, through close observation of the world, that then was passed down through story work. And so I think there’s a real opportunity here to parallel some of these other fantastic programs that are happening to convey this STEM knowledge through story work.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:54:51): Thank you, Mandi. I um, oh, so much is, I’m goin’ like a million different directions thinking about what to say there and, uh, and I’m going to say the thing, Jylisa is probably tired of hearing about this but, some, some of this makes me think about uh, you know, is uh the kind of connection between like entertainment and hobby and this kind of serious knowledge erasure that you’re talking about, you know? Because I feel like, I hear what you’re saying, like what you’re saying about the like Indigenous models of education or an Indigenous or like a — a story-based or a storytelling, you know, example of learning volume and how that could include like culturally relevant and specific markers for someone in culture that might really be like specific information there. And then like maybe Native people who have a cultural reference point but aren’t, you know, specifically in that culture, they might get something out of it. And you sort of think of those as like concentric circles going out, right?

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:55:40): And then the, the kind of gist being though, that even someone who has no specific cultural reference point to the specific cultural elements here would still learn from this diversity of learning style, would still benefit from, you know, something that deviates from a pretty kind of tight frame of the way that we approach math and so on and so forth. And so thinking about that and thinking about how when we erase Native people um, including “Ancient Aliens,” is what always comes to my mind, you know I feel like that has gained a purchase in our society as like a kind of joke and uh, or even a concept, you know? People in the past weren’t sophisticated enough to have built uh fantastic things, or to have had, you know, advanced technology, and so therefore it’s like an alien intervention.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:56:27): And I wish that that was entirely within the realm of entertainment, but there’s like a shocking percentage of people that actually sincerely believe that. I think it’s like 35% or something of people in polls that I’ve seen in research. And it’s like, wow, that’s like one in three people really think that instead of my ancestors being brilliant enough to make Mesoamerican pyramids, they think that aliens, of which we have literally no proof of them coming and building Mesoamerican pyramids, you know, that’s a more rational explanation than the genius of Native people.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:56:57): And so thinking about that and this kind of Crabtree Collection too, where it’s like when we um, you know I’ve talked in some of our other interviews, how over the course of doing this project, I’ve started getting all these Facebook ads trying to sell me different flintknapped points. Or uh most recently, I saw a display where someone on maybe like on a farm, had gotten all these arrowheads and arranged it into a gigantic like uh headdress sort of mosaic, um all non-Native people. And I mean, there’s probably like 3,000 arrowheads or something in here. Jylisa, I saved this to share on the Teams for later when I saw it on my Facebook the other day. I was like, “Oh my goodness.” And so really thinking about the ways in which these like hobby or casual practice has this thread to what you’re talking about in terms of this Indigenous knowledge erasure and the way it situates Indigenous people as ahistorical and not technologically um sophisticated.

Mandi Harris (00:57:49): Oh and that, there was another example I was going to say, uh Sunshine Shepherd. She works for the Idaho National Laboratory. She’s uh Shoshone Bannock. She teaches geometry, she teaches math skills through ribbon skirt making. And so ribbon skirts aren’t necessarily culturally specific to one tribe, uh but they are, uh, very much within, you know, broader Native cultures throughout the, what’s now known as the US. And so I love that teaching, because when she was explaining it in this uh session that we had for Indigenous Idaho, one librarian, who was non-Native, realized in that moment that she was good at math because she’s been sewing her own clothes since she was 10. And so Sunshine explaining how she teaches math through ribbon skirt making, this woman all of a sudden realized, “I’m good at math,” because she had been brought up in western modes of education that only explained being good at math as this one very narrow thing. And so I, it was a really amazing moment because of this benefit that Sunshine is showing to Native kids, but also the impact that this can have on non-Native learners as well.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:58:53): Well and I think there’s something in particular too for um learners who have been marginalized or minoritized by the dominant learning systems, right? So it’s, it’s not uncommon for women, for instance, to have that stereotype threat of being bad at math or having internalized that message. And so I — I love um what, what you’re getting at here, which is the sort of depth and breadth of diversity of people that these uh Native ways of knowing and Native ways of teaching um, how — how much that opens it up in a sort of um, more equal way for all kinds of learners.

Mandi Harris (00:59:27): Mm-hmm.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:59:27): Well, Mandi, we’re, we’re at an hour here, I think, just about. So is there any other um things you want to wrap up with? Any other thoughts that you want to add to anything you’ve said so far?

Mandi Harris (00:59:37): No, I just want to say [Transcription Needed 00:59:39], thank you. I am so grateful and honored that you allowed me to be on this advisory board alongside so many scholars that I respect and admire and from whom I have learned a tremendous amount.

Marco Seiferle-Valencia (00:59:54): Well, thank you, Mandi, um I agree. We have been blessed with a — a wonderful advisory board, and you have been a big part of that. So thank you for your uh participation, your energy, your good thoughts and good work on this, um it’s much appreciated, and we’re delighted to have you here. So um with that, I — I think we’ll say we’re all done and go ahead and shut down recording. Thank you uh to our viewers for watching.