[Virtual] Toward Ethical Scholarship: Stolen Land, Stories, and Identities

The West Tisbury Public Library, Aquinnah Cultural Center, Aquinnah Public Library, and Chilmark Public Library will offer a free virtual community event, “Toward Ethical Scholarship: Stolen Land, Stories, and Identities,” on Saturday, November 14 at 4:00PM on Zoom. For more information or to register and receive the Zoom link, please email gwilbur@clamsnet.org.

This program will examine extractive scholarship and its ongoing impact on Indigenous communities and local cultural institutions. Panelists will discuss ethical research practices grounded in reciprocity, consent, and accountability, exploring how libraries, academic institutions, and researchers can move beyond extractive models toward more community-informed practices.

The panel will feature Kim Toney, Coordinating Curator of Native American and Indigenous Collections at Brown University; Linda Coombs, author and historian from the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah (Gay Head); and Christine DeLucia, historian at Williams College and author of Memory Lands (2018).

In Indigenous contexts, “extractive scholarship” broadly refers to approaches that treat communities as sources of data rather than as knowledge holders. In practice, extractive scholarship often takes the form of non-Native academics, authors, and historians producing work that benefits researchers and institutions without meaningful return or reciprocity to the communities studied, overlooking Indigenous sovereignty, consent, and ways of knowing. Extractive scholarship is a practice that reproduces the very colonial power structures it often claims to examine and dismantle.

This event is free and open to the public, welcoming librarians, educators, researchers, and community members alike.