Photo courtesy of University of Alberta Libraries

Lorisia MacLeod, currently learning services librarian at the Alberta Library, Canada, previously worked as an instruction librarian at NorQuest College, Edmonton. A member of the James Smith Cree Nation, MacLeod realized early in her career that there was a major problem with properly citing Native and Indigenous sources in academic papers. The work she set in motion to correct this issue led to her being named a Library Journal 2022 Mover & Shaker. LJ recently caught up with her to learn more about her efforts.

LJ: How did you become interested and involved in working on citations from Native and Indigenous sources?

Lorisia MacLeod: The seed was planted during my undergrad [years]. I took a double major in French language and anthropology, focused on archaeology. I was lucky to have two instructors, Dr. Jack Ives and Dr. Kisha Supernant, who I would describe as lovingly critical of archaeology and the history it had. The entire anthropology field was taking Indigenous stories and knowledge and making it so the person who gets the accolades for this information is the—usually white—anthropologist.

That really stuck in my head. But it wasn’t until I talked with folks at NorQuest College about how we talk about Indigenization and decolonization and academia [that I realized] there’s this problem: You can’t cite an oral teaching with anything better than a “personal communication.” It doesn't necessarily have space to acknowledge some of the relationships that are really important, like which community you’re from. Even using that can end up replicating this idea of homogeneity, where we’re all the same and we all have the same teachings, which is absolutely not the case.

How did you begin developing a solution?

I had a relationship with the folks in the Indigenous Students Services Center [at NorQuest]. I started off with, “Hey, is this something you think you would be interested in working on?” It just developed from there, with a lot of conversations. I drafted up the pieces that I thought would be important, such as the relationships, and asked what should be removed or added.

If you look at the citation templates [I helped develop], you’ll see they’re meant to give a lot of flexibility. For example, the relationship to treaties—there might be some individuals who feel very strongly that’s a relationship they want to acknowledge, and they want that to be part of their citation. But for others, that may not be a relationship that they have. In Canada, we have unceded territory that has no treaty attached to it.

It wasn’t meant to create anything prescriptive. It’s enabling a conversation about how Indigenous knowledge keepers should be cited, and trying to help researchers really think about the fact that that is a conversation they can and should be having.

How can customizing citations to recognize their true sources change things in the Indigenous and Native communities?

Lots of people wouldn’t think of citations as a place to shake things up or make a change, but the conversation we have around it can affect how we’re talking about Indigenous knowledge. It’s how we’re talking to Indigenous knowledge keepers, and how we look at the kinds of things in academia or even in libraries, the things that we don’t necessarily think about being able to be changed. And maybe they can, and maybe they can be made better, and they can bring more people to the table.

You’re no longer in an academic library. Are you continuing the work of evolving citations to more accurately reflect Native and Indigenous sources?

I am very lucky to have a lot of support from my current position at the Alberta Library [a consortium of 300 libraries of multiple types]. But a lot of it is also volunteer. I have people who reach out to me personally wanting to ask questions about the citation style because it’s connected to my name. Or they’re looking to find a way to help explain it to educators who are really established in the old processes, the old ways, and looking for ways to explain why this matters to that audience. I’m really happy to lend my time, my voice in that way.

I’ve also been involved with giving presentations. There seems to be strong interest in the legal field looking at ensuring that Indigenous knowledge is going to be represented in future editions of citation styles. I think it would have a huge impact. That’s one of the things where, even though people might think of citation as a pretty boring thing, when you think about legal citation and the concept of authority, that can ripple down and impact everything through the justice system. That’s a pretty important system to be impacting, and that’s had a lot of traditional harms and exclusion of our voices in the creating of processes. I’m really excited to see what that could help people do in the long run.

I recently presented at the American Association for Law Libraries [Conference], and there was huge interest in discussing the inclusion of tribal law. One of the elements of that is it can end up being about laws or teachings that are held only in an oral format. You think of the law as this monolith that you can’t ever get changed, and stuff’s not open for discussion. I imagine it will be slow, but slow is better than none.

What do you see happening in the future with these citation changes?

The thing with citation guides is they don’t come out with new editions all that often. McGill is working on [the] next edition of the Red Book. It takes years to create those. But one of the benefits of that is it means there can be time spent building relationships and having conversations about how those citation models could be best supplied. And those relationships are probably what in the long run are going to lead to the most impressive change, I think.

More broadly, there has also been some interest in the scientific field, which is exciting, because the scientific field has been another one of those fields that traditionally has taken Indigenous teachings and basically made them into pharmaceutical company intellectual property. I’m really excited to see what potential there might be there.

Do you have advice for people interested in entering the world of academic librarianship—particularly BIPOC candidates?

One of the most amazing things I learned from the educators during my undergrad was the best way to combat something is not to see your field as something perfect and pristine, but as something that is beautifully flawed. That means there’s a place for you to be involved in making it better to make sure that voices that haven’t been heard are at that table.

The problem is, it depends on each individual organization. Some organizations have a lot of internal work they need to do first where the environment that they currently have might not be a good place for those diverse people to be involved in. Or it can be unfortunate when an organization says all the right things, says they want to make change, but when people actually try and make change there’s a lot of adversity. Sometimes it requires taking a look internally. Precarity is a big problem. Term and contract positions can be difficult, especially when it’s hard to shake the boat when your contract renewal’s right around the corner.

Also, make sure you’re hiring diverse people not just to do diversity work. We’re a diverse group within Indigenous librarians. There are folks who love to work on Indigenous matters. I love talking about Indigenous comics. But I’m also really good at licensing. There’s nothing wrong with hiring me to do licensing, because that’s also something I can do. We have Indigenous folks who run a mad story time. If we want to work on Indigenous matters, that's fantastic. Please find ways to support us doing that. But don’t necessarily assume that that’s what we want to do as part of our job. That’s a form of discrimination all on its own.