You can find books by searching by keyword, keeping in mind that the words people use to talk about relevant topics will vary greatly depending on their group identity, academic training, language, context and perspective! Using one simple example, Native American, American Indian, First Nations, Indigenous and/or more specific identities like Navajo or Diné -- all are used in different contexts by different people. Indigenous scholarship crosses international borders and languages. Words carry meaning and reflect both power dynamics and the identities of those creating and organizing information.
Pro tip: Find books by subject headings in our catalog, OneSearch! Subject headings are specific words or phrases used to find and organize books and articles by topic. If you find one relevant book in the catalog, check its subject headings and select one to find other books that have been tagged with the same subject heading!
Here are some examples of subject headings that you can use to find materials about Native Americans in the library's catalog.
The way information is organized often reflects the prejudices of those that create and work within the system. The Library of Congress, the organization that develops subject headings used by many academic libraries, has used many outdated and offensive terms to refer to groups of people. Some have been updated, while others remain.
For example, the Library of Congress changed Chippewa Indians to Ojibwe Indians in order to use this tribe’s self-preferred name. However, there is still much work to be done in this area. Calls to change subject headings to more accurately represent the Native American experience have not yet been made e.g. from relocation to removal. --See "Omissions and Distortion Abound in Libraries, Too" (4 Feb. 2019) by Sanford Berman
Source:
University of California Merced. (2022, August 5). Native American & Indigenous Communities: Search Terms & Subject Headings. Native American & Indigenous Communities. Retrieved August 12, 2022, from https://libguides.ucmerced.edu/native-american-indigenous/search-terms
The" Search Tips & Strategies" content on this page was reused from a Research Guide entitled "Indigenous Education" By NorQuest College Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. We thank them for sharing these with us so that we may learn from them.