Open Access Indigenous Research

Contents: About the Collection | Data Collection | Project Information | Site Information | Tech

About the Collection

This collection contains graduate student theses and dissertations on Indigenous people and subjects, collected from Open Access Institutional Repositories in Washington and Oregon. Research universities often maintain online repositories, central storage locations, for academic work created or published by their students and faculty. Access to these works is usually restricted to the university, but growing momentum towards Open Access means more and more authors chose to make their work open to the public. The goal of this collection is to bring together common works across multiple repositories to promote the accessibility and visibility of Indigenous scholarship and data.

Data Collection

Institutional Repositories

This collection is a reflection of knowledge created in the Pacific Northwest, a rainy and forested region on the western coast of North America. This land is the home of the Coast Salish, a term that describes many tribes (federally recognized and not) connected by language and history. The PNW stretches up through British Columbia, Canada, but given the limited scope of this projec the collection is restricted to work created in the United States. The universities represented here were chosen by first compiling a list of research institutions in Washington and Oregon that had online institutional repositories with Open Access content, beginning with the Orbis-Cascade Alliance. I conducted a preliminary exploration of the repositories by sample searching keywords to estimate how many relevant works each contained. For robust data collection, I prioritized universities with high (50+) amounts of relevant works.

Individual Works

Indigneous research contains multitudes, and often comes from scholars outside of specific Indigenous/Native American programs or courses. Works were selected for inclusion based on literary warrant, or how the works self-identified: through keywords and description in the title, abstract, content, or subject tags. Author disclosure of Indigenous identity was not a collection requirement. Only student theses, dissertations, and projects were chosen, due to the prevalence of these works within institutional repositories and for curation in the DTL’s OCLC collections.

Disciplines for each work were chosen from the school or department that authored the degree, and as such they represent the localized culture of learning from which each graduate student writes. There are over 100 different disciplines included in the dataset, including Architecture, Poetry, Public Health, Drama, Psychology, Educational Leadership, Criminal Justice, and many more. Unsurprisingly, many works come from environmental disciplines such as Forest Science and Resource Management, Fishieries Science, Wildlife Science, Marine Science, and Water Resources Policy and Management. This highlights the way Indigenous knowledge and history is intimately connected to the land and environment, and highlights the importance of tribal sovereignty, the right to self-governance.

Metadata

The metadata collected for each work was informed by the Dublin Core Metadata Schema and copied directly from each Institutional Repository page to reflect the intention of the author. The fields include:

• objectid (a unique identifier)
• title
• creator (the author)
• date (year the work was published)
• work type (theses for Master’s students or dissertation for Doctoral students)
• discipline (from department issuing degree)
• subject (assigned keywords and subject tags. Some universities choose to use Library of Congress subject headings, while others take a more free form approach without adhering to a classification standard.)
• location (the university)
• description (the abstract, if provided)
• filename (link to the work)
• format (record)
• OCLC number (you can use this to look up a work in WorldCat)
• type (text – although some works contain images and multimedia)

Metadata was hand-collected by Avery along with assistance from several DTL interns (thank you Javi, Sierra, and Maggie!).

Project Information

This digital collection was curated by Avery Johnson, graduate student at the University of Washington, as part of a 2025 Capstone project for the Library and Information Science program. As a white woman, I acknowledge that my understanding of these issues is limited by my privilege and lived experiences, and I am constantly striving to decolonize my practice and perspectives. My goal for this project is to prioritize Indigenous people and knowledge and use my privilege to increase access to this body of knowledge for the benefit of Indigenous researchers.

This project was sponsored by the Open Access Digital Theological Library, whose mission “is to curate high-quality content in religious studies and related disciplines from publisher websites, institutional repositories, scholarly societies, archives, and stable public domain collections.” The vast majority of works included in this digital collection are cataloged in OCLC, one of the largest integrated library systems in the world, and included in the DTL’s OCLC collections.

Image Source: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. “Mt. Rainier, Lake Washington, Seattle, Wash.” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed March 17, 2025. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-a0b0-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Site Information

The images used on the Home page and the About page are postcards of Tahoma (Washington’s Mount Rainier) from the New York Public Library’s digital collection.

• Home Page Image
• About Page Image

Visualizations were created using Rstudio and Datawrapper.