New Grant to Support Preservation of Records Used to Secure Navajo Nation Water Rights
On November 7, 2024, the Council on Library & Information Resources (CLIR) announced the award of a $300,000 grant to a library preservation collaboration between the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources (NNDWR), Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environmental and Social Justice at the University of Arizona and LLMC as part of CLIR’s Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Amplifying Unheard Voices grant program.
Now in its fifth year, the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources Library Preservation Project (NNDWRLPP) is digitizing 8,250 print resources from the NNDWR library. Over the next three years, the grant will enable the project to digitize a total of approximately 1,500 documents, which represents around 10% of the collection.
Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Amplifying Unheard Voices is a grant competition administered by CLIR and supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support efforts to preserve materials that deepen public understanding of the histories of people of color and others with work, experiences and perspectives that have been insufficiently recognized.
In addition to the new grant, the collaboration has received financial support through various sources, including the Haury Program. The law library continues to seek financial support.
“It’s the first of its kind of project in the country,” notes Miguel-Stearns. “It can serve as a model for other institutions and partnerships.”
The project isn’t merely about preserving historic documents, though, Ugstad notes. She says of the NNDWR, “they use it for their day-to-day work. They use the general resources and the maps, and they’re still creating documents. … The goal is, whenever we’re done with the entire project, they can also input these newer documents.”
And those documents will continue to play a role in the Navajo Nation’s efforts to secure water rights. “Many Indigenous people say water is life,” says Petersen. “You can’t have health, you can’t have economic security, without access to water.”
To learn more about the projec and its importance please visit the College of Law annoucement.