Mosaic Scholarship: Sage Innerarity

Sage Innerarity, who is pursuing a graduate degree at Simmons University’s School of Library and Information Science with a concentration in cultural heritage informatics, is the 2024 recipient of the Mosaic Scholarship given by the Society of American Archivists (SAA). The $5,000 scholarship is given to a student who demonstrates potential for scholastic and personal achievement and who manifests a commitment both to the archival profession and to advancing diversity concerns within it.

Innerarity is a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, spending her time in the program processing archival materials, developing curriculum for K-12 classrooms, and conducting oral history interviews with elders of the Miwok Indians at the Miwok Heritage Center in Ione, California. Innerarity subsequently used her experience working on these oral histories to craft her senior honors thesis, using a literary and historical approach to reframe California history from the Miwok perspective. After graduating, she was selected as the Post Baccalaureate Fellow in Native American Literature in the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College. In that role, Innerarity creates exhibits, designs website prototypes, and collaborates with local Tribal leaders to better describe, care for, and create access to archival collections. She is also heavily involved in campus and cohort communities at Simmons, acting as the ALA Student Chapter Coordinator and an SLIS Student Advisory board member. In these roles, she advocates for student needs, collaborates to develop programming, connects students with library professionals, and provides opportunities for students to build relationships with their cohort members.

One supporter wrote of Innerarity, “she is highly motivated to pursue community engaged research and develop culturally informed archival collections, and holds a remarkable capacity for creative, collaborative thinking.” Another adds, “It would be difficult to overstate Sage’s commitment to the concerns of Native communities.”

First awarded in 2009, the Mosaic Scholarship also provides recipients with a one-year membership in SAA and a complimentary registration to the SAA conference.