New fellowship supports community-led Indigenous studies research at John Carter Brown Library

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] - From a 19th century Algonquin-English dictionary to a 1612 map created by Samuel de Champlain depicting a territory colonized by France in North America called "Nouvelle France," the John Carter Brown Library houses a vast array of resources related to the early Americas.

For Keshia Lawrence, a member of the Ramapough Munsee tribe, access to those resources is enabling her to advance her research into the history and ecology associated with Indigenous people. She is exploring the materials with support from library staff as an inaugural fellow with the John Carter Brown Research Fellowship for Indigenous Communities.

Launched this year, the fellowship supports Indigenous-focused research by community members who may benefit from the library's collection of materials focused on the history of the Western Hemisphere from the 15th through 19th centuries. The program is part of a growing effort to ensure the library's collections, programming and funding opportunities are open to community members, including Indigenous groups directly.

"Our hope is that this fellowship will enhance the flow of ideas and knowledge in all sorts of new ways," said Karin Wulf, director and librarian of the John Carter Brown Library, which is an independent research library located in the heart of the Brown University campus.

Lawrence is the program's second fellow; its first, Sophia Ramos, a Nipmuc tribe member, created a detailed and comprehensive index of the many cultural and spiritual practices connected to Nipmuc and other Northeastern tribal histories mentioned in the library's primary sources.

As part of Lawrence's research, which began this fall and will continue into the spring, she has been studying the library's pre-colonial and colonial-era maps depicting characteristics of the landscape and which species were plentiful at the time.

"This documentation gives us insight into what the healthier bioindicators in this area once were," said Lawrence, who works as an Indigenous education specialist at Harvard Forest and co-founded a nonprofit organization focused on Indigenous-led science and ecosystem research. "I'm looking at where we have documentation of species, like eel or sturgeon, once being a plentiful reality and thinking about how landscapes have been transformed by settlers."

As she advances her research, Lawrence is working to catalog some of the resources she finds so that they are more accessible to tribal communities and the broader public.

"Historically, there has been a lack of community voices in what these documents represent, but also how they are stored and who has access to them," said Lawrence, who lives in Connecticut. "The heightened attention to Indigenous research at Brown is a positive development."

Kimberly Toney, the inaugural coordinating curator for Native American and Indigenous collections at the John Carter Brown Library, said the fellowship program represents an important, concrete step toward increasing public access to resources related to Native American and Indigenous history and culture.

"It was really exciting to conceive of a fellowship that is focused on bringing in new and more diverse audiences of people to connect with the collection," said Toney, who is a member of the Nipmuc tribe and began her role at Brown in 2022.

Funded for a period of up to four months, the fellowships are open to the public, and fellows can engage in research in person, virtually or in hybrid format. The opportunity is open to Native and non-Native applicants who live anywhere in the world and to make the fellowship as accessible as possible, it does not require some things typically associated with John Carter Brown Library fellowships, such as an academic background or an affiliation with an academic institution.

"Many of the folks who are doing community-informed research, like those who are tribal preservation officers, for example, are people who might have full-time jobs or do other things, but they need the time, the space and sometimes the financial support to support deep research," Toney said.

As part of the fellowship, researchers have access to housing at Brown and support from library staff. They are also able to access the resources at Brown University's libraries, including the John Hay Library and the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library.

Beyond the fellowship program, the John Carter Brown Library is exploring ways to expand access to its Indigenous collections, like an open house and research night for tribal community leaders that the library hosted last spring in its reading room.

"Indigenous people have oral history and other traditions that we carry forward in our communities, but there's a whole other set of resources available in libraries that are really important for Native people to have access to in order to reclaim and recover some of our history," Toney said.

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