The Education Director/Librarian from Hoh was visiting our library. We asked him what print materials about Hoh he knew of, as we could only think of the chapter in Jacilee Wray's Native Peoples of the Olympic Peninsula: Who We Are, and Chelsie Papiez' masters thesis for Evergreen College, Climate Change Implications for the Quileute and Hoh Tribes of Washington: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Assessing Climatic Disruptions to Coastal Indigenous Communities.
He told us there were also chapters about Hoh elders in Wisdom's Daughters: Conversations With Women Elders of Native America by Steve Wall, and Wisdomkeepers : meetings with Native American spiritual elders by Harvey Arden.
To get the most out of the materials we have, it appears, we need to know what's inside every item. Which to a surprising extent one or another of us does, but suppose the person who knows isn't around? We can put subject headings on the records to point to the material of local interest. But this might give a seriously false impression: no, Wisdomkeepers is not only or even mostly about the Hoh, there are also chapters about elders from 15 other tribes around the country. Each of the Peninsula tribes has a chapter in Wray's book. We could start rummaging and adding scads of subject headings: Charles Wilkinson's Blood Struggle : The rise of modern Indians has a heap of material about the Quinault. Alvin Ziontz's memoir has a lot of material about the Makah. Shall we (inconsistently) add headings, making the collection (inconsistently) more useful? Do you see? It's like heading down a rabbit hole.
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