This month is Native American Heritage month, and this year, the American Heritage Center has chosen to highlight two student interns currently working on an internship project with us. Georgie Moss and Darwin St. Clair are working with the Native American collections to assist in the ethical stewardship of our collections related to Native and Indigenous communities.
These two interns are affiliated with the Native American Education, Research, & Cultural Center (NAERCC) at the University of Wyoming. They’re focusing on collections associated with primarily the Northern Arapaho, Eastern Shoshone, and Crow nations to help the AHC begin to identify, evaluate, and develop protocols for engaging tribal communities in discussions about the future stewardship of these collections.
The goals of the internship include providing the students with archival research skills and archival handling and evaluation experience. In return, these students aim to help us begin to better understand our Native American collections, their relationships to tribal nations, and help us begin to plan how to steward these collections moving forward.
This semester Georgie and Darwin began looking through some of the AHC’s collections that center around or contain Native American material. They have looked at the Demitri B. Shimkin papers, the John Roberts papers, and have just begun reviewing the Emily Hill and Dorothy Tappy Ghost Dance Audio collection. They examined the material within these collections and began to make observations on the content.
Darwin is a senior in UW’s Education program. He’ll be student teaching in the spring, and wants to teach math once he graduates. He was surprised at some of the material in the AHC’s holdings, and that anyone can come look at the breadth of resources available here. He noticed that, although the Shimkin papers has many interviews with tribal members, there were no names for half of the people interviewed. He’s been working to contact the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer to see if they have some of the place names he has come across on maps, or anything on the reservation. Darwin is enjoying the internship and the AHC is certainly benefitting from his work and knowledge.
Georgie is a sophomore in the Secondary Education program within UW’s Environment & Natural Resources department. Outside the classroom, she enjoys sewing, beading, photography, and spending time outdoors. Her love of learning new things drew her to this internship opportunity. A highlight for Georgie was discovering the language material written in cursive throughout the collections. She found the interviews and language records particularly compelling as she and Darwin spent about two months working through the Shimkin papers.
The American Heritage Center is eager to learn from these two students as they chart a path forward for stewarding these collections. Both students have begun to develop ideas regarding types of collection material we should steward more carefully, especially regarding content related to the Sun Dance. They’ll produce an end-of-semester report recommending which materials may require limited access and which should become priorities for enhanced stewardship practices.
The project’s end goal is the formation of a working group to advise on community participation and collection stewardship with the tribal nations. This group will provide recommendations for how the AHC can engage with these communities in the care and decision-making involved in stewarding these collections. Eventually the working group will assist us with recommendations for a standing advisory board or other group to work with both the AHC and tribal nations. This advisory board would provide guidelines and procedures for the Center to follow when using, collecting, or otherwise caring for Native American collection materials.
Moving forward with this internship and these long-term goals, the AHC hopes to build and strengthen ties with tribal communities, honoring their deep history in Wyoming through respectful care of these collections.
We thank Georgie and Darwin for stepping up to help us take these first steps and look forward to the continued collaboration with both the NAERCC and the tribal communities.
Post contributed by AHC Processing Archivist Brittany Heye.