Growing up attending Grand Rapids Public Schools, Amy Westcott remembers feeling ashamed to be Native American.
She said her school didn’t provide many opportunities for her to learn about the history of Anishinaabek people, cultures and lived experiences.
“It wasn’t something we talked about,” Westcott said.
Westcott said when she was in school, tribal libraries were not as prevalent, and when she did encounter books about Native American people, they sometimes were catalogued under inaccurate or pejorative terms.
For more than ten years, as the district's coordinator for the Native American Education Program, Westcott made it her mission to create the space she never had.
Today on the city’s Northwest side, that space takes the form of more than 3,000 books: a library focused on Native American stories, told by Native American authors, the first collection of its kind in a public school district in Michigan.
“The big thing that brought this together is our students wanting to see themselves in those books and authors,” Westcott said.
The Native American Education Program Library at the Grand Rapids Public School District is now a place surrounded by art created by a local Indigenous artist, where students can explore, among the stacks, where they come from.
“We have The Mishomis book by Edward Benton-Benai,” Westcott said. “A book that tells the creation story of our people, the Anishinaabe.”
The collection also features books and resources to help kids learn Anishinaabemowin and Potawatomi languages, as well as 14 other languages spoken by Indigenous peoples across the United States.
“There’s a lot of games and flash cards in the languages," Westcott said. “This library is just so cool.”
Since the library opened in April, book donations from community members have been piling up, something Westcott takes as evidence that the Native American Education Program library will soon outgrow its space.
