Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center (CISDRC) Honored by Society of American Archivists
Award recognizes 'profound impact' on Native American communities
by MaryAlice Bitts-Jackson
During the past six years, Dickinson’s Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center (CISDRC) has provided educational resources to more than 250,000 teachers, students, scholars and descendants of students at the Carlisle Industrial Indian School. Now, the Society of American Archivists (SAA) is honoring the college’s Archives & Special Collections for this important work telling the complicated history of the first federally managed off-reservation boarding school for Native Americans.
Dickinson's Archives & Special Collections is the 2019 recipient of the SAA’s Philip M. Hamer–Elizabeth Hamer Kegan Award, recognizing archivists and institutions that increase public awareness of archives documents and help preserve America’s documentary heritage. The 2019 Hamer-Kagen Award will be presented at an Aug. 4 ceremony, during the Joint Annual Meeting of the Council of State Archivists.
“Dickinson College’s Archives & Special Collections has shown unwavering commitment in connecting this digital collection to the people who can make the best use of it,” noted the SAA in a written statement, adding that this work has had “a profound impact on the lives of generations of Native American people.”
The SAA went on to note that the CISDRC has made its collection available to Native communities, scholars, genealogists, teachers and students through symposia hosted at Dickinson, at national conferences and through its web portal, which corrals teaching resources, images and more than 180,000 pages of digitized records.
This past year, with funding from a National Historic Publications & Records Commission grant, the CISDRC has also reached into the community, offering a teachers’ workshop for Carlisle educators; distributing 250 free teaching kits for use in schools, libraries and other institutions throughout the United States; and traveling to tribal communities in Idaho, Montana, Wisconsin, Oklahoma and upstate New York to present related educational, genealogical and scholarly information on site. (Teaching kits are also available for purchase through the Dickinson College Bookstore.)
“We’re very honored to receive this award,” said College Archivist Jim Gerencser ’93, who co-directs the project with Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology Susan Rose ’77 and Special Collections Librarian Malinda Triller Doran, “and it’s important to note that work of this scope is only possible because of the partnerships we’ve made, including a close collaboration with the Cumberland County Historical Society, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and our partnership with the National Anthropological Archives, which supplied historic photographs of the school.”
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Published July 16, 2019