Who We Are

 

 

Principal Investigator (PI) Dr. Sandy Littletree, (Navajo/Eastern Shoshone) is an Assistant Professor at the UW iSchool. She received her PhD from the UW iSchool in 2018 and focused her research on the history of tribal libraries in the United States. She has her Master’s degree in information services from the University of Texas at Austin and a Master’s degree in curriculum and instruction from New Mexico State University. She is from the Four Corners region of New Mexico.

 

 

 

Co-PI Professor Cindy Aden is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at the UW iSchool since the fall of 2020. She has her Master’s degree in library and information science from the University of Washington. Aden has worked as a librarian at the Library of Congress, University of Washington and as Amazon.com’s first librarian, and at OCLC, the largest global library cooperative. She was the Washington State Librarian from 2016-2020.

 

 

 

 

Ash King is a third-year student in the iSchool’s Masters in Library and Information Science program. Her background is in research, with undergraduate work in Sociology and American Indian Studies at the University of Washington. Her present work focuses on knowledge organization systems and their impact on Indigenous communities.

 

 

 

 

 

The Information School at the University of Washington has distinct strengths in its Native North American Indigenous Knowledge (NNAIK) initiative and tribal library research. Dr. Cheryl Metoyer (Eastern Band Cherokee) began the process of building a program for Indigenous knowledge inside the UW iSchool nearly 20 years ago. Today, the NNAIK initiative particularly focuses on the Master of Library and Information Science program, (MLIS), to develop Native librarians and library leaders, as well as non-Native library leaders who understand the importance Indigenous ways of knowing in the LIS field. It currently has three tenure-track faculty members and supports the work of Native students and Native-focused scholarship in the undergraduate, graduate and PhD programs.