The Schoolcraft Collection of Books in Indigenous Languages at the Athenaeum contains over 200 published translations of nineteenth-century catechisms, tracts, Bibles, primers, grammars and vocabularies. Over the past year, as part of a grant-funded project from the Lyrasis Foundation, Sage Innerarity, the Boston Athenaeum’s Indigenous Collections Fellow, has been exploring this remarkable collection and developing a new guide to help researchers better understand its historical and cultural context. Sage joined us for a special presentation and shared her work on this project. Learn more about how these materials came to the Athenaeum, as well as how the materials reflect the complex relationships between Indigenous peoples, missionaries, and the organizations responsible for funding and governing missionary efforts.

About the Speaker

Sage Innerarity, MLIS (she/her) is a citizen of the Ione Band of Miwok Indians and the former Indigenous Collections Fellow at the Boston Athenaeum. She is an alumna of Amherst College, where she studied English and American Studies with concentration in Native American Studies. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, she combined oral histories and archival research in her summa-recommended, award-winning thesis entitled “Stealing the Fire: (Re)claiming, (Re)telling, and (Re)covering Miwok Creation Stories and Oral Histories.”

In May 2025, Innerarity graduated with her MS from Simmons University School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) where she studied Cultural Heritage Informatics and Archives Management. During her time at Simmons, she was a recipient of the Society of American Archivist’s Mosaic Scholarship and the winner of the Kenneth R. Shaeffer Award. Innerarity continues to support cultural heritage preservation as a member of SAA’s Native American Archives Section Steering Committee and in her role as a Program Coordinator for Fresh Tracks, a program of the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions.