A Library Matter of Genocide: The Library of Congress and the Historiography of the Native American Holocaust

Abstract

For decades, Indigenous experiences of mass killings, atrocities, ethnic cleansing, and assimilation have been marginalized from genocide studies due to the ways in which knowledge is constructed in the field, specifically in terms of its focus on definitions and prototype-based conceptions. This article argues that these exclusions are not merely owed to discourses internal to genocide studies, but are affirmed by conventional library terminologies for the purposes of knowledge organization and information retrieval in the form of Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and classification, as applied to books regarding genocidal colonial encounters with Indigenous Peoples. These headings largely exhibit euphemistic tendencies and omissions that often fail to reflect the contents of the materials they seek to describe, not only impeding retrieval of books on this subject, but also their incorporation into current scholarship. To determine the extent to which the assignment of LCSH and call numbers corresponded reasonably to the stated intent of the authors, searches in OCLC’s global WorldCat catalogue were conducted for books related to the Library of Congress subject “Indians of North America” and some variation of the keywords genocide, holocaust, or extermination, yielding a list of 34 titles. The subject headings and classification designations assigned to these books were then analyzed, with particular attention paid to euphemisms for genocide, colonial narratives, the exercise of double standards when compared to non-Indigenous genocides, or outright erasure of genocide-related content. The article argues that Western epistemologies in both genocide studies and library science have marginalized Indigenous genocides, reproducing barriers to discovery and scholarship, and contributing to a social discourse of Native American Holocaust denial. Instead a pragmatic view in library science is proposed, in which claims of genocide on the part of authors are taken as given and which would recognize the legitimacy of Indigenous perspectives concerning their relationship to land and how processes of assimilation (such as Canada’s residential school system) were consistent with Raphael Lemkin’s original definition of genocide. It argues that enabling our ability to name and discuss genocide in North America can contribute to a more honest reckoning with our history and hence the basis for reconciliation and social justice.

Liberating Knowledge at the Margins

“…To illustrate the proposed model, the author considers four recent examples of LIS scholarship that take discursive approaches to oppression in knowledge organization systems as they relate to conceptions of race and gender (Adler 2017;Doyle 2013;Fox 2015;Samuelsson 2010), before reflecting on his own work concerning the history of genocide against Indigenous peoples in the Americas-a topic of considerable controversy among historians (Dudley 2017). These works, it is proposed, are prototypical (if not fully realized) examples of the paradigm.…”

“…To illustrate the proposed use of statements in a context concerning matters of recognition, let us consider the book The American West and the Nazi East (Kakel 2013), which was also discussed at length in the author's previous work (Dudley 2017). Kakel's stated intention in this study is to compare, contrast, and draw parallels between the policies and actions of the government of the United States against its Indigenous population and those of Nazi Germany against Eastern Europeans; by considering the subject headings assigned to the book in WorldCat catalogue as statements, we can ask whether or not they accurately describe Kakel's discursive act.…”

Untitled

“…Their work demonstrates that survey methods and quantitative analysis can be undertaken according to the best practices of collaborative research described in the qualitative work in the above section. Dudley (2017) examines how the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) are assigned to books that cover the genocide of Indigenous Peoples in North America. He notes that the process used ends up being positivistic-the headings are meant to be applied in a neutral way that reflects an objective, external reality.…”

Unsettling the Future by Uncovering the Past: Decolonizing Academic Libraries and Librarianship

“…While I am a strong advocate of changing how items about and by Indigenous peoples are portrayed in library systems, I want to focus this section on library services. For more discussion on decolonizing classification systems see Lee (2008), Duarte & Belarde-Lewis (2015), Dudley (2017), andVaughan (2018).…”