Searching the Past, Finding the Present: Identifying Contemporary Tribal Communities in Gilcrease Museum's Rare Books Collection

Abstract

Gilcrease Museum staff and scholars embarked on a multi-year project in 2023-2024 to research, identify, and catalog Native American Tribal affiliations within Gilcrease’s rare book collection. The Helmerich Center for American Research (HCAR) houses approximately 4,000 rare books from the Gilcrease Museum. First collected by Thomas Gilcrease (Muscogee Citizen) in the mid-20th century, the collection tells the hemispheric story of the Americas from 1494 to the mid-1900s. A small team at HCAR, including Dr. William (Billy) Smith, Associate Director, Dr. Benjamin Pokross, Duane H. King Post Doctoral Fellow, and Jana Gowan, Reference and Outreach Librarian, began surveying, researching, and documenting the presence of tribal communities and Indigenous creators in the museum’s rare book collection in order to create more accurate and culturally sensitive catalog records while also increasing accessibility to and understanding of the Gilcrease collections. This presentation will provide a general overview of the project design and progress to date and specifically feature the use of the Tribal Nations in Oklahoma Metadata database in support of the project, while also inviting input from the cataloging community.