Portion of Mural titled The Struggle of Native American People for Sovereignty (1976) by Robert Mendoza photographed by Timothy Drescher
The Native American Studies Department at UC Davis takes a hemispheric approach to scholarship, recognizing the interconnections between Indigenous persons throughout the Americas (NAS Department, n.d.). This guide was curated with undergraduate, graduate, faculty and other community in mind. It is structured as follows:
Academic Foundations. In this section, users will find information resources providing overviews of concepts within scholarly research that are relevant to Native American Studies including methods and theoretical frameworks. Additionally, there are “tertiary” information resources (i.e. reference works that give overviews of existing information but do not provide original interpretations), and a writing resource.
Academic Research Tools. This section is meant to help users search for information. The curated list of databases are useful search tools that will help you retrieve subject specific academic information. In addition to databases, Archives and Special Collections (locally and outside of UC Davis) contain rare items, and primary source materials. These collections are also searchable. The third types of information resources in this section are datasets, which provide potential sources of existing data that can be analyzed and incorporated into research.
Community. This section contains a range of information curated by other organizations. Those linked include the X̱wi7x̱wa Library, an Indigenous Library focused on “Indigenous approaches to teaching, learning and research” (X̱wi7x̱wa Library, n.d.), an international organization focused on Indigenous data sovereignty, and materials on DQ University with historical local significance. The creators of this guide recognize issues within information institutions, such as holding items of cultural significance without consent, mining and recording Indigenous ways of knowing without consent, and biases within informational organizational structures (Cummins et al., 2023). This section is meant to supplement western forms of “knowledge” and “research” by making connections to non-western epistemological approaches prominent elsewhere.
Additional Library Support. In this section, users will find information on services provided by the DataLab, which is a department within our library and offers guidance on data science and visualization. Here users will also find information on the concept of data management. Information on publishing your academic work is also found in this section.
Student Research Prizes. This guide ends with a link out to different Library Awards for student scholarship-- the Lang Prize and Graduate Student Prize.
Always remember that if you’d like additional support understanding how to find information in any of these areas, you can set up a consultation with your librarian. We are here, and happy to support you!
Guide Creator Note
If you have any questions, concerns or ideas for improvement about this guide, please feel free to contact Kate or Rebecca.
References
Cummins, J., Soto, A., Anderson, J., Gosart, U., Ward, A., & Carroll, S. R. (2023). Enhancing Stewardship of Indigenous Peoples’ Data, Information, and Knowledges in Libraries and Archives through Indigenous Data Governance. Library Trends, 72(1), 13–47. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2023.a938211
Native American Studies Department, UC Davis. (n.d.). History. https://nas.ucdavis.edu/history
X̱wi7x̱wa Library, University of British Columbia. (n.d.). https://xwi7xwa.library.ubc.ca/