Red Cliff Ginanda Gikendaasomin Library

The Red Cliff library is the community library of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, a tribe located on the very Northern point of Wisconsin and near the shores of Lake Superior. The library is currently housed in the Red Cliff Tribal Administration Building, and serves the surrounding tribal community by providing resources including access to technology, community space, and a collection of materials by Native authors and on Native topics.

A tribal library is essentially a library located on a reservation, with a few exceptions. School and college libraries that are located on a reservation are also classified as tribal libraries. These libraries differ from non-tribal libraries in that they are designed for a specific tribal community, with the aims of preserving the culture of the tribe as well as providing information resources to that community. They often have collections that are centered around Native representation, and provide materials that assist in learning the Indigenous language of the tribe.Tribal libraries are a relatively new phenomenon, as up until around the 1960s the only libraries located on reservations were those designated for the white missionaries trying to "civilize" Native people. Tribal libraries are especially important to tribal communities because many tribal members can feel excluded from public libraries, where the idea that Native people have different information needs was not thought of until as recently as the 1990s. Tribal libraries provide specific resources for Native people, and can include things such as language resources, cultural resources, and a collection that focuses on representing the tribal community members.

The Red Cliff band is a smaller group of the larger tribe of Ojibwe people, an Indigenous tribe located throughout the Northern region of the United States and in Southern Canada. What is now known as Wisconsin is home to eleven federally recognized tribes. The Red Cliff band consists of around 1,500 resident members and is located on one of the smallest reservations in Wisconsin. Of the twelve tribes in the state, the majority have libraries dedicated to serving their tribal community, though many of them are not listed on maps archiving tribal libraries in the country.

The library has gone through a journey in recent years, moving from one building to another with the aid of some outside sources including the UW-Madison Information School. The library was originally housed in an old mission school building. Mission schools are schools that were established by white people in order to assimilate Native people into white culture, and were located all throughout the country and in many communities in Wisconsin. The operation of these schools was roughly from the 1860s to the 1960s, but many remained open after that period. Years after the mission school in Red Cliff closed, the tribe opened up a library in the building, but soon found that the building was unfit to house the library. 

 When the old mission school library was closed, the Red Cliff tribe reached out to the University of Wisconsin – Madison Information School. The students who went to help the tribe recreate their library formed a group now called Tribal Libraries, Archives, and Museums or TLAM, a group focused on making connections with the tribes in Wisconsin and address their information needs. With their assistance, the tribe was able to work to envision what their tribal library would need to be an effective resource for the community.

The students and faculty from TLAM worked with community members and library staff to develop a library that would effectively serve the community, and in 2015, the new library opened after seven years in the making. It now provides many valuable resources, including access to computers and other technology. Their collection also features a range of materials centered on Native topics and authors. The new library was given the name Ginanda Gikendaasomin, which means “we seek to learn” in Ojibwe, a fitting name for a place that provides so much for its community.

GINANADA GIKENDAASOMIN. 2020. GINANADA GIKENDAASOMIN. [online] Available at: <https://ginandagikendaasomin.weebly.com/> [Accessed 4 December 2020].

Redcliff-nsn.gov. 2020. Welcome To Red Cliff Band Of Lake Superior Chippewa. [online] Available at: <https://www.redcliff-nsn.gov/> [Accessed 4 December 2020].

 2020. Interview with Louise Robbins.

Burke, Susan K. The Use of Public Libraries by Native Americans. The Library Quarterly, vol. 77, no. 4. Published October 2007.