Arizona State University opens space dedicated to Indigenous librarianship and students

When Alex Soto began working at the Labriola National American Indian Data Center at Arizona State University Library in 2021, he was the center’s only full-time employee.

Two years later, he reimagined the center into the first Indigenous-led and staffed library spaces at a research university in the United States. The newly created space for the Labriola Center officially opened on the second floor of the Hayden Library on ASU’s Tempe campus on April 3.

Soto, who is Tohono O’odham, said this is the first time Indigenous people have led the center since its establishment in 1993 to be a space that supports Indigenous students and academia.

Now, the Labriola Center has six full-time Indigenous staff members and 12 student workers. It is 6,000 square feet and reflects ASU as an institution and the land on which it was built.

When designing the space, Soto said he knew he wanted to include O’odham culture because ASU is located in the ancestral homelands of the Akimel O’odham (Pima) and Pee Posh (Maricopa) peoples.

The space is surrounded by artwork showcased in two ways: murals on the glass walls enclosing the space and a large painted mural welcoming visitors at the entrance.

“These murals depict significant mountains in O’odham culture to let students know that we’re still an O’odham land, but the land also has knowledge, more than a book will ever have,” Soto said.

The painted mural showcases how modern and traditional knowledge meets by showing a book and traditional O’odham staff connecting at the top of the land. It was painted by Indigenous artists Thomas “Breeze” Marcus (Tohono O’odham) and Dwayne Manuel (Akimel O’odham).

Jacob Moore, the ASU vice president and special advisor to the president for American Indian affairs, celebrated the grand opening of the new Labriola Center and commended the hard work that led to its completion.

“These things don’t just happen on their own. It takes a lot of hard work behind the scenes to commit,” Moore said. “I think everybody all along the way has been committed, and it shows.”

Moore said it’s been exciting to see what started as an idea and concept come to fruition.

“We have Native students who aspire to complete their degrees in a variety of fields, from education to American Indian Studies to law. This is a place where they can not only gather, but also advance their work in a very unique way that isn’t typically offered at any major university,” Moore said.

He said that the center is an example of how ASU honors its charter, which commits to the health, education, welfare and culture of the communities it serves, including Indigenous communities.

Moore said Indigenous communities often get marginalized, but having a space like the Labriola Center shows ASU’s commitment to ensuring equity for those who want to go to college because they can do so at ASU.

With the grand opening of the Labriola Center, Soto said that it highlights the value and importance of the roles of Indigenous librarians and library staff.

“It’s been two years in the making, but this really is 31 years overdue,” Soto said.

Soto said that having a library space dedicated to Indigenous students makes sense because ASU has over 4,000 Indigenous students and more than 70 Indigenous faculty members who are involved in many high-level programs across various disciplines.

“We should have Indigenous subject specialists in all disciplines,” he said.

ASU also has an American Indian Studies Program, an Indian Law Program and a Center for Indian Education, which operates alongside many other resources available for Indigenous students.

“We have all these Native programs. We need a space that can be a place to access pivotal resources around research and primary sources such as archives,” Soto said.

Gila River Indian Community Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis said that the new Labriola Center is a point of pride, and it creates community within ASU, which is what helps Indigenous students thrive in an academic setting.

“When we talk about Indigenous academic excellence, this type of space fosters that aim,” Lewis said, by ensuring that Indigenous students are welcomed.

Lewis said that, as an alumnus of ASU’s American Indian Program, he wishes that the Labriola Center existed as it does now during his time at the university because it would have been a valuable resource for him.

He said he is proud that current Gila River Indian Community students will have access to this space because the space is “next level” and will support the research they want to do.

Lewis said he hopes that the Labriola Center’s model will urge other institutions of higher learning across the United States to take notice and replicate it within their facilities.

Another part of the work the Labriola Center hopes to do is helping the 22 federally recognized tribes in Arizona with archive projects.

Soto said it could be as simple as providing consultation on what an archive project looks like because, in his experience, many tribes may lack the capacity to do it alone.

That work is being led through a three-year project, “Firekeepers: Building Archival Data Sovereignty Through Indigenous Memory Keeping,” which will allow the center to support tribal nations that seek to establish archival collections.

Soto said having access to information is important, but it is also essential to understand the type of information being accessed. He said it is vital for people to know where that Indigenous knowledge is coming from and exactly how it may affect the Indigenous communities it comes from because not all Indigenous knowledge is meant to be shared openly.

Historically, Soto said, information has been gathered from or within Indigenous communities that may not have been appropriate at the time, whether it’s ceremonies or traditional knowledge.

He said the Labriola staff can offer that lens to process information and remind students at all levels to think about the information they share and how they utilize it.

Soto added that the materials and resources at ASU have always been available, but there have never been Indigenous librarians at the institution to put it all together and make it more accessible for students and the community.

Lewis said he appreciates the culturally sensitive research methods that the Labriola Center intends to use because ASU is a leading research university that supports Indigenous research and conducts research on Indigenous communities.

It is important for one of the top research institutions to ensure that there is an Indigenous presence to support that research, Lewis added, and the staff at Labriola can do that.

Soto said a lot of the work he does with the Labriola Center he learned from the community as an activist and a rapper, but now, he’s a librarian.

“The main component here is to provide scholarly support to our faculty and students at all levels around our reference materials,” he said, and the center has about 5,000 books that are either written by Indigenous people or are about Indigenous people. The Labriola Center can offer research support in a culturally appropriate way, he said, because a lot of Indigenous knowledge that is in Western formats is colonized.

Unfortunately, there are things that non-Natives have documented and given to the institution that are just very bad, Soto said, and it does take someone trained to utilize Western educational knowledge set alongside Indigenous knowledge to find the proper material.

“As librarians, (it’s) finding the information that’s appropriate and then being mindful that we need to share it in a culturally appropriate way,” he said. “That’s the level of care we put in our service.”

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