Dissolved group challenges structure

According to the Edmonton Public Library, its Aboriginal Advisory Group has run its course.

However, a pipe ceremony held in 2008 that unveiled the group and began the formal relationship between Aboriginal people and the EPL meant the commitment was deeper and stronger, says Jacqueline Fayant, member of the AAG.

“We believed in this. We felt so strongly about making change in a positive way and we were. It wasn’t just about what positive things we could bring to our community but also about how we could change EPL to decolonize their minds and their ways of doing things,” said Fayant.

But with the EPL’s unilateral decision to do away with the AAG in March, Fayant says the EPL has returned to colonial practises, figuring it knows best how to reach the Aboriginal community.

“They disposed of us. I feel used. I feel absolutely used,” said Fayant.

The EPL ended AAG the month before receiving the Municipal Affairs Award from the province for Library Services to Aboriginal People.

“We don’t feel that (the timing) is ironic,” said Joanne Griener, acting CEO for EPL and its executive director for management services. “In our view, the award was recognizing generally the services we are now providing to the Aboriginal communities.”

Griener holds that the AAG has fulfilled its mandate and in early 2012, the AAG’s role had “become less clear and less necessary.”

“When (the AAG) was first introduced … in 2008, we were really at a time where we were struggling with how to develop services and meet the needs of Aboriginal communities so we reached out and created this group,” she said.

Since that time, the EPL has changed its approach, now has 18 community librarians, has developed relationships with a large number of municipal Aboriginal organizations, and has grown its Aboriginal reading collections from the single location of the downtown library to all branches across the city. Griener says there are no plans to dismantle the Aboriginal collections in each branch.

The EPL is now engaging in a new community-led service model which will address the needs of all its multicultural patrons and vulnerable populations, which will also include the needs of the Aboriginal communities, says Griener.

“We’ve always had a mandate to serve that broad group. That’s what public libraries actually are aimed at,” she said.

But there is no Aboriginal representative included in that model, says Fayant, and no council of Elders to help guide community librarians, none of whom are Aboriginal.

Fayant was so distraught with EPL’s decision to disband the AAG, she took her concerns to the Alberta Human Rights Commission. There she was told that because AAG was considered a committee under EPL, that EPL could disband it when EPL so chose.

Being considered a committee is the larger issue, says Fayant, stressing that AAG always saw itself on equal footing with EPL, able to weigh in and wanting to be consulted on decisions that affected the Aboriginal community.

“We were invited to the table and this is the process I want to challenge. Organizations that invite Aboriginal people to participate, sometimes it’s around language,” said Fayant. “There was no formal contract and people defined us according to their own mainstream standards of what they thought we were, meaning a committee…. just (a) kind of dominance.”

Fayant says organizations practise colonialism inherently in their policies and that needs to change.

When EPL dissolved AAG, EPL “missed our desire and wish for consultation with our community,” Fayant said. “Lack of consultation is another form of exploitation.”