What is the name of your organization?
Tribal DataWorks
What is the name of your solution?
O'odham Learning Libraries
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Open digital archives celebrating O'odham history, fostering learning, and enabling AI-driven discovery for community connection.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Casa Grande, AZ, USA
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
USA
What type of organization is your solution team?
Not registered as any organization
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Indigenous communities face significant barriers to accessing their own histories due to fragmented archival records, inaccessible historical documents, and a lack of digital infrastructure for local knowledge preservation. The O’odham Learning Libraries—including the Roots and Rivers Database and O'odham News Database—address these issues by creating accessible, community-driven digital archives that empower O'odham to engage with their history, language, and culture.
O’odham historical records are scattered across institutions, requiring extensive travel or specialized access. Without centralized, open archives, we struggle to connect with our history, and valuable knowledge is lost. This issue extends globally—Indigenous communities everywhere face similar challenges in preserving and accessing their histories.
This project embraces a community-first approach to sovereignty, prioritizing collective access and self-determined knowledge preservation over institutional control. Too often, colonial policies dictate who is recognized as Indigenous, excluding unenrolled or displaced community members from their own histories. By bypassing restrictive gatekeeping and ensuring these archives remain public, this project combats identity erasure, reinforcing the right to remembrance for all O’odham. In doing so, it offers a model for other Indigenous communities seeking to reclaim, share, and safeguard their own stories on their own terms
What is your solution?
Built on a combination of digital archiving, searchable databases, and AI-driven tools, this project enables users to explore historical materials without institutional gatekeeping. The databases are designed for ease of use, allowing community members to search for information about ancestors, books and articles, and historical events relevant to the O’odham.
A key next step is integrating AI-powered discovery tools, such as a chatbot, to help users navigate these archives. This chatbot would assist in finding and retrieving relevant historical documents, allowing users to explore the materials in the system, and overall fostering deeper engagement with O’odham knowledge. Unlike closed institutional archives, this project keeps sovereignty in the hands of the people, ensuring that history remains alive, accessible, and community-controlled.
By offering a replicable model, this approach can help other Indigenous communities develop similar digital archives, supporting broader efforts in data sovereignty and knowledge repatriation.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
This solution serves the O’odham, including in Gila River, Tohono O’odham, Ak-Chin, and Salt River communities, as well as those who are unenrolled, urban-based, or otherwise disconnected.
We face barriers to accessing our own history due to fragmented archives, institutional gatekeeping, or colonial policies that have forcibly separated families and disrupted historical transmission. Lack of access leaves many struggling to find information about their families, villages, and broader community history.
Many face anxiety and uncertainty about where to begin. Knowledge is held in relationships, passed through family and community ties, but for those without direct access to knowledge keepers—due to physical distance, displacement, or lack of social connection—it can be difficult to take the first step. The O’odham Learning Libraries create an entry for self-guided exploration, helping those who feel disconnected find a place to start when they don’t have someone to ask.
This archive is not just about accessing history—it’s about sharing it. Resources and knowledge are preserved by and for the people, rather than controlled by outside institutions. This is about keeping O’odham history accessible, living, and in our hands!
