November update

Life is happening, indeed. Busy month!

Debbie Reese visit- I was a complete deer in the headlights meeting her- I didn't know that she would be stopping in to visit in the morning and she was super-gracious about my awkwardness. I liked what she said in her discussion with J___ about "expanding the narrative." Too often, I feel like there is this sentiment of well, what do we have to take out to put these things in? What's she's advocating for isn't the complete and total destruction of the American canon, and I've had some very interesting discussions to that effect. (That said, I noticed today when I was pulling books for a group coming in that many of the titles were Native author and recommended books. Yay for librarians from W___!)

Meeting with the Stockbridge Historical Committee- I had never sat in a Historical Committee meeting, but I found it to be far less intimidating than I had imagined. We got some great advice on the direction of R__'s project and we definitely have a lot of new ideas for the work that is to come with it. We're definitely surrendering control of the content the further it moves along, which to me is a good sign. My only goals for the project are that our recommendations collection is accurate and actually gets used.

Grants writing- There's a reason that people pay other people to do this-it's a bit like learning how to write lab reports-only there is a slight chance you might get thousands of dollars from said lab report. I'm reading through a stack of sample grants right now trying to find one that is close enough to our project to use as an example. I notice that all of them have detailed "history" sections-which is hard for a project-based proposal. My goal is to get the narrative done by the end of the month-just in case I wasn't busy...or anything...

Other project-ness- I made an info sheet on libraries, education programs, and local media for all of the eleven federally recognized Nations of Wisconsin. Love the Oneida website.

TLAM Meeting- Met with some of the students in next semester's tribal libraries courses. I finally got to meet some first-years in my department outside of youth services! The curriculum will be a lot more flexible than courses I have ever taken before, but it isn't my first service learning course. If I had it my way, I would pretty much only take service learning classes. It looks like a visit to Oneida is in the works, which I am really, really ridiculously excited about since I haven't been back since the DPI workshop.