Joel Blechinger | Posted September 19, 2024
As support mounts for citing more diverse voices in academia as part of the movement for citation justice, the Library has helped develop new guidance for citing Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers. This work was done in collaboration with Student Learning Services, Mount Royal Faculty Association’s Indigenous Faculty Collective, and Roy Bear Chief, espoom tah (helper) with the Faculty of Health, Community and Education. The templates are adapted from Lorisia MacLeod’s citation templates with the aim of increasing the visibility of and reverence for knowledge shared by Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers.
In 2021, MacLeod, a librarian from James Smith Cree Nation, published an influential set of citation templates in her article “More Than Personal Communication: Templates for Citing Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers.” MacLeod’s intervention—via the creation of citation templates for Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers—was to work against the devaluation of Indigenous oral teachings, which had historically been treated as “personal communication” according to the official style guides of the American Psychological Association (APA), the Modern Language Association (MLA), and in The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS).
In APA and CMOS, personal communication is typically treated as unretrievable information, and, therefore, it is not given an entry in a reference list. According to MacLeod, “to use the template for personal communication is to place an Indigenous oral teaching on the same footing as a quick phone call, giving it only a short in-text citation (as is the standard with personal communication citations) while even tweets are given a reference citation” (p. 2). In contrast, citing Indigenous oral teachings using MacLeod’s templates acknowledges the teachings as “an equal and valid information format alongside familiar formats like books and journals” (p. 3).
When MacLeod published her article in 2021, her templates had already been adapted by twenty-five institutions across Canada and the United States, and even more organizations have done so since.
Since the publication of MacLeod's article, MLA has developed guidance to cite Indigenous oral knowledge based on her work. The Chicago Manual Style, which as of this year is in its 18th edition, likewise has adapted MacLeod's templates in section “14.137: Citing Indigenous sources of knowledge directly.” While we await updates to APA for its official guidance on how to cite Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers, we have adapted MacLeod’s APA templates for use at MRU.
Check out MRU’s guidance on citing Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers in the following resources:
MRU Guide to APA Style for Referencing (2024-2025): See “Citing Indigenous Knowledge Keepers” on page 9 and citation example G2 on page 14.
MRU Guide to MLA Style for Referencing (2024-2025): See “Citing Indigenous Elders, Knowledge Keepers, and Community Members” on page 3 and citation example F1 on page 18.
MRU Guide to Chicago Style for Referencing, 18th edition (2024-25): See citation example E3 on page 11.
For more information on MacLeod’s citation template project, check out this interview with her published by ACRLog in 2022.
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