Respecting Native Culture and Sovereignty (at the University of Arizona)

UA Ethics Roundtable Keynote Address to feature American Library Association President-elect Loriene Roy.

TUCSON - American Library Association President-elect Loriene Roy is coming to Tucson on Friday, March 23, to share her views on balancing the need for respect of native cultural property and traditions with intellectual freedom and the free flow of information. The event begins at 6:00 pm in The University of Arizona’s James E. Rogers College of Law Auditorium. There is no charge, and the public is encouraged to attend both the talk and a reception immediately following.

Today’s information explosion fueled by the Web and other information technologies has highlighted longstanding struggles over who owns and controls the knowledge, art, medicine, artifacts and traditions of native cultures and the world’s indigenous populations. The social, political, legal and ethical concerns affect a broad spectrum of professions including librarians, journalists, anthropologists, authors and publishers, health industry professionals and artists, to name a few.

Roy will draw on her own background as both a librarian and American Indian in order to focus on the need to respect tribal sovereignty and respect and observe intellectual and cultural property rights within a framework of intellectual freedom and access to information. Roy’s talk is the featured keynote address of the 2007 Information Ethics Roundtable to be held on the campus of The University of Arizona March 23-25. The Roundtable’s theme this year is Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Property: The Ethics of Cultural and Environmental Sovereignty and Stewardship.

Roy, enrolled on the White Earth Reservation, a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, is professor at the School of Information and also the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She works tirelessly to promote library services and cultural heritage programs nationally. Roy is instrumental in developing and promoting library services and cultural heritage initiatives with and for native populations. She directs a national reading club for Native children and manages a federal grant-funded scholarship program for indigenous students. She will be inaugurated as President of the American Library Association this coming June. Roy received her master’s degree in library and Information Science from The University of Arizona in 1980 before pursuing her doctorate from The University of Illinois, Urbana. Roy was named UA Outstanding SIRLS Alumna in 2002.

This year’s Ethics Roundtable has been organized in consultation with The Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management, and Policy, Research Group on the History and Philosophy of Information Access, and The University of Arizona School of Information Resources and Library Science. It is supported by funds from the Morris K. Udall Foundation and the School of Information Resources and Library Science. Additional funding for Roy’s reception is courtesy of the Arizona Library Association. The James E. Rogers College of Law Auditorium is located at 1201 E. Speedway in room 146. For more information about the Information Ethics Roundtable,
visit http://sir.arizona.edu/ier/ or call 520-621-5219.

Contact: Kay Mathiesen, University of Arizona School of Information Resources and Library Science
Phone: 520-621-5219 Web: http://sir.arizona.edu/ier/