Indigenous group names project update

July 24, 2024 -- Since Fall 2022, HAPI has been undertaking a project to review its subject headings for Indigenous group names, with the goal of replacing imposed, incorrect, or pejorative names with the group's autonym, also known as an endonym, which is what the group calls themselves. Following the lead of previous projects and recommended best practices, this work prioritizes contacting representatives of the Indigenous groups to establish preferred autonyms. Sometimes this involves seeking consensus around a name by contacting a variety of individuals in or related to the group. For groups that do not wish to be contacted, no longer exist, or for whom there is no clear means of contact, we rely on scholarly resources that may provide the autonym.

Because many of the autonyms are not in broad usage, using only the updated name can cause complications while searching in HAPI. For example, the updated name “Beni Zaa” is not broadly used in academic research so the updated heading will include a parenthetical reference to continue access to the original group name, i.e., “Beni Zaa (Zapotec).” This also follows the practice of other institutions working on similar projects, such as the Chicago History Museum. HAPI is also working on behind the scenes technical solutions to support searching across name spelling variants.

In November 2023, Matt Palmer joined HAPI as Vocabulary Review Project Coordinator/Editorial Assistant, and is leading metadata and outreach work. Dr. Mark Sicoli, a University of Virginia linguistic anthropologist, has been advising HAPI to resolve these complex issues.

To date, we have contacted 191 Indigenous representatives and 160 academic researchers out of the 357 groups named in the index. As seen in our publicly-available running list of changes, HAPI has changed 21 terms, while 61 remain unchanged after review. Beyond the internal scope of the project, HAPI’s research will support the work of the Latin American and Indigenous Peoples of the Americas Funnel Project (LAIPA) to change the Library of Congress’s subject headings, beginning with pejorative or outdated names. Please feel free to contact HAPI for any questions or issues related to this project.