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.

Is it possible to abolish war? This is the fundamental question animating Winston Langley’s book, Abolishing War (The Policy and Practice of Governance). And, though many will disagree, it is a question to which the author is persuaded the answer is yes. Far from being utopian ideals, Langley argued, international security and peace are attainable, as are their necessary corollaries: protection of the environment, conservation of natural resources, and fair enforcement of all human rights. To that end, he proposed a radically altered United Nations ― one that will afford the effective system of global governance that we all desire.

About the Speaker

Winston Langley is professor emeritus in Political Science & International Relations, Senior Fellow at the John McCormack School for Policy & Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He holds degrees in biology, diplomatic history, political science and international relations. He also holds a degree in law. His fulltime academic life was defined by teaching courses on the UN, models of world order, international political economy, and US foreign policy; by academic administration; and by scholarship, covering over a hundred articles and fifteen books, the most recent of which is Abolishing War, published by Lynne Rienner last year.

We were thrilled for Lindsay Leard-Coolidge to join us for a fascinating look at how Bostonians in the 1890s embraced the legacies of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Charles I. These Scottish monarchs tried for treason, beheaded, and martyred centuries earlier and an ocean away resonated with the city’s elite thinkers. Among them were Isabella Stewart Gardner, who (unconvincingly) traced her lineage to the Stuart dynasty, and Ralph Adams Cram, who introduced the celebration of Charles I’s martyrdom and founded the Neo-Jacobite Order of the White Rose in North America. Through objects of material culture at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and archives at the Boston Athenaeum, this lecture revealed how these historical figures shaped Boston’s cultural, religious, and political ideas at the close of the 19th century.

About the Speaker

Lindsay Leard-Coolidge is an art historian specializing in late nineteenth-century printmaking and material culture. She earned her PhD in art history at Columbia University and her MSc in Scottish history at the University of Edinburgh. She held positions in the print departments of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, and lectureship posts at Harvard Extension School and Northeastern University. She is the author of Sublime Impressions: Prints and Printmakers of the Grand Canyon, A Sense of Place: Painters of Matunuck, Rhode Island, 1873–1941, and 100 Years of Cambridge History: Highlights from the Collection of the Cambridge Historical Society. She is currently writing a novel on Mary Queen of Scots.

This event was presented in partnership with The National Trust for Scotland Foundation USA