Labriola Center Highlights: January 2025
This January 2025, the Labriola Center had several exciting events, including a panel discussion with Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band, a visit from ALA President Cindy Hohl followed by a panel discussion with Indigenous professionals in the Library and Information field, and a tabling event with RECHARGE that welcomed 500 American Indian middle school and high school students in Arizona.
Tuesday, January 21: Traditional Welcome Event with Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band
Prior to Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band's performance on Saturday, January 25th at the ASU Gammage, Michael Reed, Sr. Director of Programs & Organizational Initiatives at ASU Gammage asked if the Labriola Center could host a Traditional Welcome Event with band members. This event included food from The Rez, an Urban Eatery, and a talk with Instructional Professional Jacob Moore (Tohono O'odham) and band members Julia Keefe (Nez Perce) and Delbert Anderson (Diné). Jacob Moore interviewed the band members, and spoke about his great uncle, Russell "Big Chief" Moore (Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community), a jazz musician who played as first trombone in Louis Armstrong's orchestra. He was awarded the Legacy Circle Award. You can read about the reward in detail at O'odham Action News.
Find Featured Book from the Labriola Center Collection:
- Indigenous Pop: Native American Music from Jazz to Hip Hop
Description: "Popular music compels, it entertains, and it has the power to attract and move audiences. With that in mind, the editors of Indigenous Pop showcase the contributions of American Indian musicians to popular forms of music, including jazz, blues, country-western, rock and roll, reggae, punk, and hip hop. From Joe Shunatona and the United States Indian Reservation Orchestra to Jim Pepper, from Robbie Robertson, Joy Harjo to Lila Downs, Indigenous Pop vividly addresses the importance of Native musicians and popular musical genres, establishing their origins and discussing what they represent."
Wednesday, January 22: ALA President Cindy Hohl Visits the Labriola Center
The Labriola Center kicked off 2025 with a visit from Cindy Hohl, President of the American Libraries Association. Hohl is a member of the Santee Sioux Nation and is the second Native American to hold the position as ALA President. Hohl is also past president of the American Indian Library Association and past recipient of ALA’s inaugural Spectrum Changemaker Award.
Prior to the panel discussion, Director Alex Soto gave a tour to President Hohl on the Labriola Center space at Hayden Library. Assistant Librarian and Archivist Vina Begay shared projects related to the Labriola Center's archive and collections.
This visit included a panel discussion led by President Hohl with Indigenous scholars who are within the field of Library and Information Science. The panelists included Nataani Hanley-Moraga (Navajo/Húŋkpapȟa Lakota/Chicano), Kevin Brown (Diné), and Melanie Toledo (Diné). The panel explored how Indigenous libraries and librarians can support Indigenous Data Sovereignty goals. Hanley-Moraga shared his experience being introduced to libraries as an undergraduate student and his goals in pursuing a Masters in Libraries and Information Science at the University of Arizona while working as a Graduate Assistant at the Labriola Center. Kevin Brown has experience directing the University of New Mexico's library, where he practiced kinship and community care as a librarian and director. He is completing his Ph.D. at Arizona State University. Melanie Toledo shared her experience as a Library Manager at a tribal library, the Ak-Chin Indian Community Library.
Find Featured Books from the Labriola Center Collection:
- Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory
Description: "Who has the right to represent Native history? The past several decades have seen a massive shift in debates over who owns and has the right to tell Native American history and stories. For centuries, non-Native actors have collected, stolen, sequestered, and gained value from Native stories and documents, human remains, and sacred objects. However, thanks to the work of Native activists, Native history is now increasingly being repatriated back to the control of tribes and communities. Indigenous Archival Activism takes readers into the heart of these debates by tracing one tribe’s fifty-year fight to recover and rewrite their history."
- Visualizing Genocide: Indigenous Interventions in Art, Archives, and Museums
Description: "Visualizing Genocide examines how creative arts and memory institutions selectively commemorate or often outright ignore stark histories of colonialism. The essays confront outdated narratives and institutional methods by investigating contemporary artistic and scholarly interventions documenting settler colonialisms including land theft, incarceration, intergenerational trauma, and genocide. Interdisciplinary approaches, including oral histories, exhibition practices, artistic critiques, archival investigations, and public arts, are among the many decolonizing methods incorporated in contemporary curatorial practices. Rather than dwelling simply in celebratory appraisals of Indigenous survival, this unprecedented volume tracks how massacres, disease, removals, abrogated treaties, religious intolerance, theft of land, and relocation are conceived by contemporary academics and artists."
- Kaandossiwin : how we come to know : Indigenous re-search methodologies
Description: "Indigenous methodologies have been silenced and obscured by the Western scientific means of knowledge production. In a challenge to this colonialist rejection of Indigenous knowledge, Anishinaabe researcher Kathleen Absolon describes how Indigenous researchers re-theorize and re-create methodologies. Understanding Indigenous methodologies as guided by Indigenous paradigms, worldviews, principles, processes and contexts, Absolon argues that they are wholistic, relational, inter-relational and interdependent with Indigenous philosophies, beliefs and ways of life."
Friday, January 31: RECHARGE Conference at ASU West Valley
The ASU RECHARGE Conference, hosted in collaboration with the Phoenix Indian Center, was held at ASU West Valley campus. The Office of American Indian Initiatives (OAII) led the conference and invited the Labriola Center to table from 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. for prospective Indigenous students. ASU RECHARGE is designed for American Indian students in grades 7-12 to invest in their education, future and community. The conference focused on topics such as financial aid and scholarships, college majors, culture and identity, and specialized ASU campus resources. There was an audience of 500 American Indian students from across the state who got to interact with the various resources available to them as American Indian students. The Labriola Center promoted its culturally safe space, Native library programming, Indigenous centered collections, and research assistance from two Indigenous librarians.
Find Featured Book from the Labriola Center Collection:
- Native Presence and Sovereignty in College: Sustaining Indigenous Weapons to Defeat Systemic Monsters
Description: "What is at stake when our young people attempt to belong to a college environment that reflects a world that does not want them for who they are? In this compelling book, Navajo scholar Amanda Tachine takes a personal look at 10 Navajo teenagers, following their experiences during their last year in high school and into their first year in college. It is common to think of this life transition as a time for creating new connections to a campus community, but what if there are systemic mechanisms lurking in that community that hurt Native students’ chances of earning a degree? Tachine describes these mechanisms as systemic monsters and shows how campus environments can be sites of harm for Indigenous students due to factors that she terms monsters’ sense of belonging, namely assimilating, diminishing, harming the worldviews of those not rooted in White supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, racism, and Indigenous erasure."
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