Fellows’ Ernst Posner Award: Dana Reijerkerk and Caterina M. Reed

Dana Reijerkerk, freelance data consultant, and Caterina M. Reed, academic engagement librarian at Stony Brook University Libraries, are the 2024 recipients of the Fellows’ Ernst Posner Award given by the Society of American Archivists (SAA). The award recognizes an outstanding essay dealing with some facet of archival administration, history, theory, and/or methodology published during the preceding year in SAA’s journal, American Archivist.

Their article, “Archives, Decolonization, and the Politics of Tribal Sovereignty: An Examination of Accessibility Barriers to Indigenous Federal Recognition Research in the United States,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2023 issue of American Archivist (vol. 86, no. 2), discusses the difficulties that Native American/Indigenous/Tribal Communities have in obtaining tribal recognition from the federal government because of limited access to records. By laying out and explaining the complexities in the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the federal government, this article presents a cautionary tale for archivists whose collections contain Indigenous materials. It points out that although well-meaning, the practices and policies around these collections may do more harm than good by potentially distorting the record and hindering access. The authors explore a variety of practices and policies, including Traditional Knowledge Labels, digital repatriation, costs of research, reference interactions, slow archives, and cultural patrimony, successfully forming one consistent analysis of how archives can be complicit in Indigenous erasure.

The article offers excellent and thoughtful advice on how this situation can be ameliorated. The SAA Awards Committee hopes that this article can serve as a wake-up call to repositories working with records documenting Native American/Indigenous/Tribal Communities and encourages them to implement the practical suggestions made in this article.

Established in 1982, the award is named for Ernst Posner, an SAA Fellow and past president as well as a distinguished author. Recent recipients include Eliot Wilczek for “Archival Engagements with Wicked Problems” and Alston Brake Cobourn, Jen Corrine Brown, Edward Warga, and Lisa Louis for “Toward Metaliteracy and Transliteracy in the History Classroom: A Case Study Among Underserved Students.”