Author: Sereen Suleiman

On April 20, 2022, SAASC held the last guest speaker event of the semester, in which we were honored to host Alexander Soto (Tohono O’odham), the director of the Labriola National American Indian Data Center at Arizona State University (ASU) Library. As Soto said, the center is a “library within a library.” According to Soto, the university was built on Native American land, specifically the land belonging to the O’odham tribe (O’odham meaning people or community), leading founder, Frank Labriola, to establish a library at the university dedicated to preserving indigenous culture. This resulted in the development of the Labriola Center in 1933. Later on, Frank set up an endowment, and the funds from the endowment enabled the center to create collections for housing indigenous records. 

Since its inception in 1993, the Labriola Center has become an essential service to ASU’s indigenous community. The primary purpose of the center is to support scholarship and instruction on indigenous knowledge across all disciplines at ASU. In fact, the settings and landscape cultivate this through the following:

• A separate area in the library for research consultation.
• A customized table reflecting indigenous culture.
• Books touching on native topics and native themes.
• A distinctive manuscript collection, some of which are very unique. Some even help people write in their languages, which is significant because the languages are being forgotten.

Furthermore, there are five notable collections in Labriola:

• Simon J. Ortiz Papers, 1946-1992: contains the writing, research, and correspondence of indigenous poet, Simon Ortiz.
• Peterson Zah Collection, 1969-1994: contains the professional papers, correspondence, newspaper articles, photographs, and audiovisual materials of politician, Peterson Zah.
• Trudie Jackson Papers, 2018: contains campaign materials, flyers, notebooks, and agendas describing Jackson’s campaign for the Navajo Nation Presidency.
• Dorothy Parker Papers, 1976-1991: contains publications, documents, transcripts, photographs, and a student yearbook, with the bulk of the materials dedicated to the closure of the Phoenix Indian School.
• Elizabeth Brandt Mount Graham Papers, 1990-1991: contains legal documents, correspondence, photographs, research, and Brandt’s writings depicting her efforts to stop the construction of telescopes on Apache land.

What drives Soto, as well as the rest of the archivists and librarians at Labriola, is the mission to advocate for the Native American community and in doing so, keeping indigenous cultures and traditions alive for future generations. Due to colonizers rewriting the history of the natives, nearly wiping out their heritage, language, and customs as a result, it has only become more imperative to preserve indigenous records that will honor Native Americans’ history and contributions. Archives are powerful tools, because selected records have the ability to tell stories of a person, event, place, and a community of people. Thanks to repositories such as the Labriola Center, indigenous communities can share their records, knowing that their stories will be told with the respect and appreciation they deserve.

To end with a quote from Dr. Maria Montenegro, “Unsettling evidence–to question its materiality, conception, legitimacy, objectivity, authority, and originality–are anticolonial endeavors that can lead to archival decolonial thought and praxis.”

Indigenous community at ASU. Photo provided by Alex Soto.