North American Indigenous Languages in the British Library's Post-1850 Collections

This CDP will engage with current debates about the role of cultural institutions in collecting, preserving and promoting indigenous languages, and the ethical issues that such activities raise. The core supervisory team is the British Library Curator for North American Printed Collections (Fuentes) and a U.K. expert in indigenous history (Porter), supported by a secondary team at the forefront of indigenous language studies (Professor Dale Turner (Anishinaabe), Department of Native Studies, Dartmouth College; Mishiikenh (Vernon Altiman, Mohawk), Queen's University, Ontario; 3) Professor Marianne Mithun, University of California, Santa Barbara. The student will be encouraged in their first year to use Student Development and institutional funding to complete one or more short but intensive language competence courses run by co-supervisor Mishiikenh in Ontario. They will use their acquired knowledge of Anishinaabe and will work with indigenous communities to generate the first survey, identification & tagging of indigenous language holdings in a series of BL collections and they will identify and significantly improve catalogue records in relation to indigenous languages. The student will begin by engaging specifically with BL Boarding School publications and the variety of material therein (primers, reference texts and indigenous creative output), before going on to explore dictionaries and religious texts in translation, as well as 20th century Native newspapers, activist campaign materials and literature by indigenous authors and poets. To help them comprehend this work in indigenous context, they will be encouraged to explore methodologies such as 'up-streaming', asymmetries of power within other post or neo-colonial contexts and linguistic code switching as defined by Penelope Gardner-Chloros and others. The student will seek to learn from the expertise of the curatorial and learning teams who worked on the 'Windrush: Songs in a Strange Land' exhibition and will also participate in a Library indigenous working group.