CURRENT POSITION Assistant Professor, Instruction & Digital Services Librarian, Diné College, Kinyaa’áanii Charlie Benally Library, AZ DEGREE MLIS, University of Rhode Island, 2014 FOLLOW bit.ly/SorellPublicBooksQA; bit.ly/SorrellLibVoices Photo by Oleksandr Makeyev

Restoring Native Narratives

After completing her MLIS at the University of Rhode Island in 2014, Rhiannon Sorrell, a member of the Dineì (Navajo) nation, returned to reconnect with her community and deepen her work. As instruction and digital services librarian at Diné College—the first tribally governed and accredited college in the United States—Sorrell has taken on projects that dive deeply into Navajo language and culture.

Since 2022, Sorrell has been working on two projects funded through National Endowment for the Humanities grants. “Tribesourcing Southwest Film: Digital Repatriation” involves the restoration of nearly 500 early 20th-century films in the American Indian Film Gallery at the University of Arizona. In these films, created by white outsiders to promote tourism, Sorrell saw that the narration was often inaccurate and disrespectful. Having Diné storytellers provide narration will allow the films to reflect Native context rather than bystanders’ perception. A second project, “Digitizing the Moving Images of the Colorado Plateau and the American Southwest,” is digitizing 400 rare moving images held by Northern Arizona University’s Cline Library.

“Building relations with the storytellers of the community was one of the things that helped ground me back into the Navajo nation,” says Sorrell. In turn, reshaping how stories are told gives her the opportunity to bring this learning to the universities she works with and “challenge staff who may not be from tribal nations to question who gives authority.”

Sorrell has also received an American Library Association Libraries Transforming Communities grant to develop Navajo language learning resources, as well as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Diversity, Inclusion & Cultural Heritage to collaborate with fellows from the University of California and the Smithsonian to bring diverse collections to light and reach out to a range of audiences. “I am a teacher and I learn from my community,” she says.