Carrier Sekani Tribal Council ditches ‘western-centric’ library organizational system
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PRINCE GEORGE—A local organization is ditching a “western-centric” organizational structure used in libraries world-wide for a new one that will take Indigenous issues into account.
Carrier Sekani Tribal Council (CSTC) is saying good-bye to the Dewey Decimal System, which organizes library materials by grouping them, via field of study, in ten different categories. The Tribal Council says, in a release, that the structure of the system “fails to acknowledge Indigenous knowledge as an evolving body of information.”
“Indigenous information is approached as a thing to be studied through a western, colonial lens that reinforces the North American representation of First Nations as a past culture rather than a modern, growing peoples.”— Kat Louro, Archivist, CSTC
Louro has been working alongside UBC iSchool student Alexandra Alisauskas and UBC Xwi7xwa Head Librarian, Sarah Dupont to introduce a system that “considers how knowledge exchange among First Nations is tied to geography and distinguishes Indigenous communities from each other,” reads the release.
