Roar of the librarian

When RRU librarian Dana McFarland accepted a secondment at the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group (HTG) a year ago, she faced a librarian’s nightmare. Hundreds of boxes of First Nations research papers, journal articles and legal opinions sat stacked with no cataloguing and no discernable order, in the HTG portable building on the outskirts of Ladysmith, B.C.

Amassing thousands of documents was meant to give an information edge to negotiators seeking a self-governance treaty for the six First Nations within the HTG – the Cowichan, Chemainus, Penelakut, Lyackson, Halalt and Lake Cowichan bands. Instead, the information became an incoherent burden eating into floor space.

The problem also added inertia to the notoriously officious pace of negotiations, now in year 14. Without quick retrieval of historical texts or background research, discussion threads with the provincial and federal governments on fishing rights or timber resources, for instance, could drag out to nothing.

“Two years ago we realized we had a critical mass of data, more than we could efficiently find,” says Brian Thom, an HTG negotiator. “We had thousands of documents that were more-or-less inaccessible. We needed a professional librarian to come in and help.”

With small-town serendipity, a top-flight librarian just happened to be in the neighbourhood. McFarland, the head librarian for Royal Roads University, lives only a few blocks from Thom in Ladysmith, a picturesque seaside community on Vancouver Island’s east coast. They even knew each other as kids from the old neighbourhood in Abbotsford, in B.C.’s Fraser Valley.

Royal Roads agreed to assign McFarland to the HTG and even made up the difference in her salary from what the treaty group could afford. The deal had other advantages. Her hour-long commute to Victoria was cut to seven minutes.

McFarland came into the HTG on the heels of a UBC library sciences student who had made an admirable dent in the document mass. “[The student’s] work served to magnify the value of an information management program,” McFarland said. “It was a fascinating opportunity to make the document system work, and Royal Roads certainly saw value in it.”

McFarland, admittedly a little overwhelmed at first, set to work. The information management system had to be sustainable and consistent, and provide reliable Google-like document retrieval. McFarland mapped out a classification and key-word strategy as she and her assistant Della Daniels digitized documents into the Xerox Docushare database.

An intractable challenge was avoiding losses in translation. Hul’qumi’num, an ancient Coast Salish language, had been written with the Roman alphabet for less than 100 years. Spellings could be inconsistent between aboriginal communities separated by less than 50 kilometres.

“It’s a big issue to have systematisation with a language that is primarily oral,” McFarland said, who spoke on the issue at a provincial First Nations technical conference. First Nations members within the HTG office made executive decisions on Hul’qumi’num spellings for consistency. McFarland herself took weekly classes on spoken Hul’qumi’num.

“It was a good opportunity to learn the language and it really facilitated the work,” she said. “The [HTG staff] were a great group of people to work with. And the project was an opportunity to get back in touch with my profession, to do real library work but in a different context.”

Stacks of binders and documents remain, but by any reckoning, McFarland’s library framework is a resounding success, and with deep ramifications.

Thom, the HTG negotiator, says the electronic and physical libraries are a key element for future self-governance. Moreover, he says consultants and academic researchers could remotely access portions of the document database, making the HTG electronic library an active research institution.

“Royal Roads has made a major contribution. The university has provided a technical framework for building future self-governance,” Thom says. “It shows the difference between theory and practice. Royal Roads sent us the best librarian we could have, and she built an incredible amount of capacity for us. It is a university in action.”

Robert Morales, the HTG’s chief negotiator, agreed McFarland’s work give the strategic edge the HTG has sought for a decade.

“Dana made the information accessible,” Morales says. “If we can find information quickly it does create an advantage. At the negotiating table it is good to respond to issues quickly to maintain a level of interaction, rather than let things die or lose continuity.”

The document library couldn’t have come at a more critical time. Recent developments in British Columbia have called entire treaty negotiation structure into question. Morales has formed a unity table with 60 First Nations to break common stalemates with the provincial and the federal governments.

The Hul’qumi’num table has been at the agreement-in-principal stage for years, the phase that hashes out the meat of the treaty, including land, governance, taxes, co-management rights and fiscal relationships — all the problem points.

Thom says the document library has allowed the HTG to take a leadership role in writing policy and developing solutions to move past the impasse.

“This has allowed us at HTG to become policy leaders. The HTG library is now a key resource to draw on a decade of work under our belt,” Thom says. “We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We can get to policy solutions, bridge the gaps and get to a final treaty.”

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