Composed by RAD members Alison Clemens and Monika Lehman
Warning: This blog post includes racist and sexist language
In November 2021, United States Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland formally declared “squaw” to be a derogatory term and charged a task force to determine replacement names for geographical place names using the word. The Department of the Interior noted “The term has historically been used as an offensive ethnic, racial, and sexist slur, particularly for Indigenous women.” In response to the Department of the Interior decision, the Reparative Archival Description Working Group (RAD) began Phase I of what became a two-part project in which we located and remediated or contextualized the term in Yale’s archival description. Because of the offensive and oppressive nature of the slur, the Department of the Interior determined that “sq___” should be used in formal departmental communications regarding the term. RAD has therefore likewise decided to use sq___ in place of the slur in its communications, and sq___ will be used throughout the rest of this blog post.
In fall 2022, new place names were released by the Derogatory Geographic Names Task Force; those place names are available here: official Sq_ replacement names.
With the establishment of the new place names, RAD prepared to update geographic place names in Yale Library’s archival description to either reflect the new place names or to contextualize the former place names. These updates align directly with RAD’s larger charge to remediate or contextualize potentially outdated or harmful language used in archival description and to create archival description that is accurate, inclusive, and community-centered. With the support of colleagues in Yale Library Special Collections Metadata Services, RAD identified seventeen instances of “sq___” place names to be reviewed. These ranged from corporate names using a place name (e.g., Sq___ Valley Mutual Water Company); to names of organizations that have changed their names since the archival material in Yale’s collections was created (e.g., the Community of Writers, formerly known as Sq___ Writers Workshop and the Community of Writers at Sq___ Valley); to true instances of the geographic place names (e.g., Olympic Valley, California, formerly called Sq___ Valley).
The differing contexts of the usages of the geographic place names required varying approaches to reparative work. To strive for consistency while still allowing for flexibility and nuance, RAD drafted standardized descriptive notes to be used and adapted in different contexts. These notes were specific to the project but adapted from RAD’s more general Standardized descriptive notes. This post will describe two approaches to redescription: one in which we contextualized corporate names that include the former place name, and one in which we replaced a former place name with its updated name.
In some cases -- like the use of sq___ place name in corporate names -- RAD determined that the best approach would be to contextualize the use of the slur. Because these corporations, many of which are no longer extant, have not been renamed, it seemed misleading and not historically representative to alter or remove their corporate name in our archival description.
An example of retaining and contextualizing corporate names is here; please note that the sq___ slur is still in place in records within this series: Roy Edwin Ramseier Papers, Series I: California Projects. Series I of this collection includes a processing information note that reads:
This series contains files for organizations and places that use the oppressive and harmful term "[sq___],” based on their location in what was formerly known as "Squaw Valley," California, now called Olympic Valley. The use of this description is not an endorsement of the language it contains. This language has been retained to promote searchability and discoverability of the collections.
The collection level record includes a revision statement indicating that the finding aid was revised in August 2023 to “contextualize oppressive and harmful descriptive language in Series I.” That revision statement points users to the Series I processing note for more information.
RAD recognizes the potential harm that users -- particularly Indigenous users -- may experience in encountering this slur in our description. We hope that these contextualization notes provide information about why the slur has been retained in these circumstances.
Although most of the instances of “sq___” in place names in our archival description were instances in which we determined that contextualization was the best approach, we did replace a geographic place name in a subject heading: Olympic Valley (Calif.). The record for this place in our descriptive system (ArchivesSpace) used the former place name for Olympic Valley, and we were able to update this record to use the current place name, which is also used in the place’s updated Library of Congress Subject Heading. As we prepared to complete the geographic place names project, we contacted colleagues in Yale Library’s general Technical Services department and partnered with them to do similar replacements for other subject headings in Yale Library’s descriptive catalogs, outside of the system specifically for archival description. That work is currently underway, and the Yale Library catalog will use the updated place names wherever possible and appropriate.
In summer 2023, after meeting with Yale Library Special Collections Technical Services Archival Description Unit (ADU) heads, Matthew Gorham and Mary Caldera, on implementing the geographical place name changes for Phase I, we established a plan to address all instances of sq___ in our archival description beyond place names. We thought this would be a good opportunity for a project that would help us establish a reparative archival description community of practice by getting staff involved outside of the RAD Working Group. Until this point, we had not had a project enlisting the help of volunteers outside of RAD. We decided that the number of instances of sq___ in our description, twenty-one, could be manageably divided among volunteers.
In October 2023, we asked for Yale Library staff volunteers and had seven volunteers from the ADU and the Arts Library offer to help us with the project. We met with the project team in November to share our prepared standard processing notes that the volunteers would add to the ArchivesSpace records, to assign collections to each volunteer, and to discuss the project overall. Then the volunteers had six weeks to request and review the items in their assigned collections, do research, and decide whether to keep the existing description and add a contextualizing note or remediate the description by removing the word sq____. RAD’s established practices meant that contextualizing notes would be added if the description was supplied by the creator or part of a formal title, and the term would be changed if it was supplied by the archivist. We add these contextualizing notes at the collection level and an abbreviated note at the folder level so that users can see the notes both alongside the other collection level notes and near the term itself. Following the project team meeting, we held an office hour to answer questions and set up a Microsoft Teams channel to discuss and address issues. We had a second project team meeting in December in which all volunteers were able to share their experiences, challenges they faced, and what they learned.
We sought feedback from the project volunteers on how to plan for future projects where we can divide reparative archival description project work among staff in order not only to teach more staff to do reparative description work but also to tackle large scale projects that are too big for the RAD Working Group to accomplish themselves. We want to empower all Yale Library archival description staff to work on reparative work in their roles, and this project allowed us to start a community of practice in this area.
One volunteer wrote the following blog post about his experiences working on this project.
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