Thread by @JMLoyer

Library classification systems are racist af. But in the 70s, Brian Deer, from Kahnawake, created a system for the National Indian Brotherhood that’s still in use today. Here’s why this is HUGE:

There were certainly Indigenous librarians working prior to Brian Deer, like Charles A. Cooke, who proposed “Indian National Library” that Duncan Campbell Scott rejected (see the book Paper Talk for more)

But Brian Deer, in organizing records for the National Indian Brotherhood, realized that most ways of organizing information were inappropriate for an Indigenous collection. Instead of trying to make his records fit a white dude’s idea of the universe, he made his own.

Libraries are bad at dealing with resources about Indigenous people. Library of Congress puts most native stuff under E75-E99, in history. There’s so much othering, marginalization, and omission.

LCC, for example, misrepresents Indigenous ways of seeing the world by organizing nations alphabetically.

Brian Deer flipped this around: his system replaced this weird alphabetization with geographical and kinship ties between nations. It shows, on the shelf, the way nations are tied together by land and language connections.

His idea that classification can reflect the Indigenous knowledge systems underlying the work is radical. But for him, he just wanted to help the mostly native users of these mostly native records find their things.

His classification system was taken up by other libraries who had Indigenous collections: Gene Joseph used it in the library at the @UBCIC, and later for the @Xwi7xwaLibrary at UBC.

It’s currently in use at the Aanischaaukwamikw Cree Cultural Institute, the @NCTR_UM library, and @imagineNATIVE library. It’s had huge impact on the way we organize and think about Indigenous resources.

Brian Deer passed away this month, and I am forever grateful for his work. He gave us a vision of the future where we don’t need to use a system that denigrates Indigenous ways of being to organize our knowledge; so powerful.