PROJECT: As Long As the Sun Shines: Indigenous Digital Libraries Across North America

Library Futures intern Thomas Gagnon-van Leeuwen developed As long as the sun shines: Indigenous digital libraries across North America, a StoryMap that explores questions of Indigenous sovereignty in Canadian digital libraries. As he reflects in his introductory blog post:

In North America, libraries and archives have traditionally participated in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Stolen artifacts are scattered across the world in colonial museums, and mainstream classification schemes relegate Indigenous peoples to the past.

But a new generation of digital libraries is emerging. They leverage the possibilities of the digital age to put power back where it belongs: in the Indigenous nations. They create culturally-relevant metadata, devise nuanced permission systems that map onto local protocols, and imagine governance models that avoid the pitfalls of the past. They forge new futures for Indigenous cultural sovereignty and preservation.

As long as the sun shines takes us from Inuvialuit lands in the Western Arctic to a Passamaquoddy reservation in northeastern Maine, with stops in Wet’suwet’en territory in the Rockies and Anishinabe communities in northern Quebec. We meet trailblazing Indigenous librarians who paved the way for today’s digital libraries.

Ultimately, the story invites the reader to reflect on their role as a librarian in a world where cultural heritage is increasingly under threat and on how to build resilience in the face of adversity.

The project is a model of how digital humanities/digital scholarship library workers can interrogate questions of indigenous sovereignty in their own work, and models the ways of bringing these questions into instruction and internship supervision.