This guest post is by Shir Bach, a 2022 Junior Fellow at the Library of Congress.
On October 19, 1978, more than two hundred people gathered at the Denver Airport Hilton Inn to attend the White House Pre-Conference on Indian Library and Information Services On or Near Reservations. In an article about the preconference published in the American Indian Libraries Newsletter, delegate Dennis Reed reflected on that first day of the four-day event:
“Speeding down the highway in the Hilton coach surrounded by Indians.
Out of the bus and inside the inn for registration.
Unfamiliar faces saying words of welcome and sign in please. (…)
New people all around, laughing and talking as they greet old friends.
Good times for all tonight; tomorrow is for getting down to business.”
Joyous community and hard work—these are the enduring preconference images. Over the course of four days, attendees changed the history of Native libraries in the United States. Their work was the culmination of more than a year’s worth of effort by Virginia H. Mathews, whose papers in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division document the significance of this meeting.
Mathews was not a librarian, but few have done more work for the field than she. In a 1998 interview, she self-effacingly remarked that though she did not have a library degree, she “may have earned one a few times”—an understatement if ever there was one.[1] The early decades of Mathews’s career, including as director of th