Case Study: Remediating Harmful Names and Titles at the Intersection of Race, Gender, and Indigeneity Through the Sq___ Project Phase II 

Composed by Quin DeLaRosa 

 Warning: This blog post includes racist and sexist language 

Phase II of the Sq___ Project involved staff volunteers from beyond RAD, including myself, to address instances of sq___ in Yale’s archival description. Like Phase I, the participants in Phase II had to grapple with a unique set of challenges, opportunities, and considerations in our efforts to remediate archival description. These efforts, in turn, allowed project participants to work toward supplanting a legacy of harm with one of restorative justice.  

Phase II of the Sq___ project began with volunteers meeting and discussing questions including was the description written by the archivist or the original creator, is the title a formal or published title and therefore must be retained, and should the catalog record associated with the finding aid also need to be changed? The answers to these questions are often depend on the circumstance and require an in-depth look at the collection. Processing notes are written by staff and provide context for why language was retained or changed. For instance, in cases where offensive language is retained in archival description, the boilerplate processing note guidance stresses that the retention is intended “to promote searchability and discoverability” of collection material and “is not an endorsement of the language it contains.”  

One notable challenge associated with the Sq___ Project Phase II was how a dearth of information on records subjects limited the amount of useful background information available to inform what offensive language should be replaced with. This dearth of information reflects the tendency of the term sq___ to reduce the diverse cultural backgrounds of Indigenous women into a single semantic category, often obscuring critical information regarding identity (e.g. personal names, tribal affiliations, geographic regions) in the process. In one instance, a drawing attributed to D.H. Lawrence and described in BRBL Record Group 1 lacked any identifying information pertaining to the drawing’s subjects. Working within these limitations, the chosen course of action by archival staff was to replace “Indian sq___” with the phrase “Native American women.” Restoring vital information on identity is ideal, though, as this case regrettably illustrates, it is not always possible once erasure has severed those connections. Regardless of such limitations, conducting work to change and contextualize a slur, like sq___, is always a positive development that mitigates harm experienced by users when interacting with harmful language. 

Much of the deliberation around whether to change or contextualize harmful language during Phase II centered around the language’s inclusion within formal titles. One such case occurred with a film and play entitled "The Sq___ Man,” which is present in a file title within the Edwin J. Beinecke Collection of Robert Louis Stevenson. While eliminating the use of sq___ is ideal for reducing the harm caused by this slur, there are some instances in which the term’s replacement would impede the discovery of archival resources. “The Sq___ Man” was retained and the offensive language subsequently contextualized using the Sq___ Project processing note guidance. This instance illustrates the balance between limiting exposure to harmful language and promoting discovery in the archives. Each of these considerations needed to be reconciled on a case-by-case basis to draft recommendations for reparative description. 

At times, small-scale instances of reparative description present opportunities to take a fresh look at a collection and analyze other components of its description. In the Peter E. Palmquist papers, a documented instance of sq___ in the file’s title pointed to an engraving that had been reproduced in a newspaper article, itself part of a sub-series of news coverage on the Modoc War of 1872-1873. Project volunteers opted to retain the title while also contextualizing it through processing notes for both the file and the collection since it was part of a formal title in a newspaper article. In making these revisions, it was determined that access to the sub-series could be improved by adding new subject headings to the finding aid and catalog record. This action spotlighted the Indigenous records subjects by identifying their tribal affiliation, Modoc, and geographic location, California, in the subject headings, both of which promote discoverability through culturally appropriate and accurate language. 

The need for remediation is ongoing, so project participants created a “parking lot” for out-of-scope issues that may be revisited for future projects. Future projects may also benefit from assessing the collaborative work model pioneered in the Sq___ Project Phase II. In these ways and others, ample opportunities exist to apply lessons learned from this project to support more responsible representations of those whose stories are entrusted to Yale as special collections. 

Image from the Peter E. Palmquist papers featuring harmful creator-assigned language. 

Revised archival object with added contextualization through a new file-level processing note.

Collection-level updates in the finding aid for the Peter E. Palmquist papers, featuring new language in the processing note and two additional subject headings. 

Peter E. Palmquist Papers. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library. https://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/beinecke.palmquistpapers. Last modified December 19, 2023.