| Summary: | "A Wider View of the Arctic: Indigenous-Language Materials on the Shelf and in the Classroom," by Adam V. Doskey, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Abstract: Indigenous communities around the world are at the forefront of the adverse effects of climate change. In the Arctic, where global warming takes place at an accelerated pace, the Inuit and Sami People are faced with serious challenges in their efforts to maintain their cultural and linguistic identities, which have a rich but often underappreciated history. The literature of Arctic exploration is a long-established collecting area in many special collections libraries. However, the voices of the Indigenous People who encountered and aided these European and American explorers are generally not nearly as well documented in these same spaces, although many examples of Indigenous-language material exist. For instance, by the mid-nineteenth century, at the height of the British search for the Franklin Expedition, Greenlanders were publishing a newspaper written entirely in their own language, Kalaallisut, with the assistance of the Danish colonial administrator Hinrich Rink. This talk is based on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s efforts to expand the scope of a recently re-cataloged Arctic collection to include such Indigenous voices, beginning with the acquisition of that first Greenlandic newspaper. It provides practical information about acquiring Arctic materials in Indigenous languages while also making a case for how these materials can most effectively be used in classroom instruction and other activities. Because many works in Indigenous languages, especially the earliest examples, involve some level of mediation through missionaries or colonial administrators, these materials raise unique challenges and opportunities in their use in the special collections classroom. --- "'For Beauty, Grace, and Fragrance Are All Gone': Preserving Botanicals in the Anthropocene," by Ashley Cataldo, American Antiquarian Society. Abstract: Current ...
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