The DLF Forum welcomes digital library, archives, and museum practitioners from member institutions and beyond—for whom it serves as a meeting place, marketplace, and congress. As a meeting place, the DLF Forum provides an opportunity for our working groups, and community members to conduct their business and present their work. As a marketplace, the Forum provides an opportunity for community members to share experiences and practices with one another and support a broader level of information sharing among professional staff. As a congress, the Forum provides an opportunity for the DLF to continually review and assess its programs and its progress with input from the community at large.
Here, the DLF community celebrates successes, learns from mistakes, sets grassroots agendas, and organizes for action.
The DLF Forum will meet in East Lansing, Michigan, USA in summer and virtually in fall of 2024. It’s important to Team DLF to acknowledge our tourism, privilege, and whose land we’re on wherever we gather.
Michigan State University occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples. (1) From the MSU website:
“In particular, the University resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw. We recognize, support, and advocate for the sovereignty of Michigan’s twelve federally-recognized Indian nations, for historic Indigenous communities in Michigan, for Indigenous individuals and communities who live here now, and for those who were forcibly removed from their Homelands. By offering this Land Acknowledgement, we affirm Indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold Michigan State University more accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples.”
We would like to offer our gratitude to the Indigenous peoples, past and present, who have cared for the lands we will meet on.
As a team, we operate remotely year-round, and in the fall we will meet virtually. For these reasons, we’d like to recognize the impact of the carbon footprint of technologies, which disproportionately impacts Indigenous communities.
We’d also like to acknowledge the free people forcibly kidnapped from Africa who were enslaved throughout the United States.
At CLIR, we are reflecting on what it means to make this acknowledgement and the type of action that must follow. We follow the tradition of donating to local Indigenous organizations in an effort to exemplify our commitment to beginning the process of interrogating and dismantling the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism.
We will continue the tradition of land reparations by making a donation to an organization decided in the near future.
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References
(1) Michigan State University. Land Acknowledgement. https://aiis.msu.edu/land/. Accessed 01/18/2024.
