Connecting Cline Library with tribal communities: A case study

Northern Arizona University (NAU) is a public state university with a commitment to Native American students (Hughes and Tsosie 2013). The university’s Cline Library strongly supports the values of academic excellence, student engagement, and student success. NAU is a unique academic institution because it has a Native student community population of 4%; according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, in 2006 Native students at US universities averaged only 1% of the entire student population. As of 2016, the Native American population at NAU was 825 students. Compared to the overall student population Native students comprise about 3% of student growth. In 2005 NAU’s strategic plan defined a commitment to Native Americans and to “become one of the nation’s leading universities serving Native Americans.” This goal is currently under revision by the university’s Commission for Native Americans and the Vice President for Native American Affairs (Chad Hamill, PhD). What does this goal mean for the university? This is the only goal in the university’s strategic plan where a specific community is mentioned and highlighted as a priority. The institution’s commitment to serving Native Americans has a direct impact on the recruitment, retention, and graduation rates for Native American students. The university commitment to developing collaborative services and outreach programs to Native American communities and promoting engagement and appreciation of Native American cultures and tribal nations within the university and broader community is still a top goal (NAU Strategic Plan 2005-2010). Today over a hundred tribes from across the country are represented at NAU. A large portion of students come from the geographic region of Northern Arizona and New Mexico. Beginning in 2008, Cline Library sought out ways in which it could align its activities with the university's strategic commitment to serving Native Americans. Cline librarians and archivists work to support indigenous students, researchers, scholars, and communities through collecting and preserving Indigenous scholarship. In order to achieve the university’s commitment to Native Americans Cline Library needs a robust collection and services available for Native students. This paper will focus on themes that emerge from a critical analysis of the library’s collections and their work with American Indian communities. It will start by describing how the library applies concepts of critical librarianship and teaching and learning to collection development. The conversation continues with the critical role of librarians and archivists at Cline Library in supporting faculty and students. Finally, as an independent yet integrated department, the library’s Special Collections and Archives unit responds to the Native American community’s tribal concerns with the collaborative management of cultural materials in ways that balance archival theory and practice with access to sensitive information. The conclusion offers strategies to improve on existing efforts at Cline and ties together many of the themes woven throughout the article