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After earning her MFA, Caitlin Wheeler took a day job at Spokane County Library so she could pursue fiction writing at night. Eventually, though, she felt herself drawn to librarianship. “It seemed to offer a unique opportunity to combine my love of stories with my dedication to making a deeper, more lasting impact on communities,” she said. 

Now a third-year online Master of Library and Information Science student, Wheeler plans to apply the skills, knowledge, and connections from her degree to build a queer library in Spokane to support queer community members, especially queer youth. 

Building community for LGBTQ+ youth, especially those who are part of a diaspora, is a commitment forged by personal experience. Wheeler’s niece, who was Indigenous, queer and neurodivergent, looked hungrily for reflections of her own identity in the world around her. “When my niece passed, someone told me, trying to be sympathetic, ‘Statistically, she was high risk,’” Wheeler said. “It hurt to hear. I thought, ‘We need to change that statistic.’” 

Libraries are a profound source of community for marginalized youth because they offer safe access to resources and information that help them learn about themselves and the world around them. Libraries with holdings that reflect diverse experiences are also fundamental to fostering empathy and understanding. 

According to Wheeler, who holds storytimes for preschoolers at the Spokane County Library, “Storytelling is kind of the closest thing to mind reading that we get.” When we listen to someone describe their experience, our neural pathways light up as if it were our own experience. Facts are one thing, she said, but stories foster understanding on a deeper level.

Last year, Wheeler, who has both white colonizer and distant Patawomeck ancestry, traveled to New Zealand for a study abroad opportunity that focused on Indigenous perspectives in librarianship. Holding Read-a-Rama activities using Indigenous American materials for a class made up mostly of Māori children helped her reflect on her own relationship with her ancestors. 

“It was powerful to connect over shared aspects of identity,” she said. The Māori people, like the Patawomeck tribe, don’t use blood quantum. Anyone who can trace their line can claim affiliation with their Indigenous ancestors. Wheeler recalls hearing one storyteller share his grandmother’s admonition when he called himself “part Maori”: “You're not part Māori. What part of you is Māori? Your nose? You're either Māori or you're not.” 

Michelle H. Martin, the iSchool's Beverly Cleary Professor for Children & Youth Services, led the New Zealand study abroad, and she reflected on Wheeler’s breadth of skills and her generosity. 

“Caitlin brought her creativity and keen eye for observation into the study abroad by creating a watercolor bird painting each day. She captured the essence of New Zealand’s bird recovery efforts beautifully, and those paintings became heartfelt gifts for our hosts. Caitlin’s inquisitiveness, active listening and spirit of cooperation will make her a fantastic librarian,” she shared.

For her Capstone project, Wheeler is helping to build a library for , which serves the local LGBTQ+ community. The collection began with 200 books and has already grown to over 600. Wheeler hopes to have 1,000 books by June, all of which will need cataloguing. 

According to Wheeler, the iSchool has one the most robust programs of Indigenous knowledge organization in the country. Her studies introduced her to the Brian Deer Classification System, for example, which was created for tribal libraries. In traditional systems like Dewey Decimal, she explained, “Indigenous people are shuffled off into one tiny quadrant, and everything that is relevant to them is in this tiny quadrant.” Brian Deer, however, centers and starts with Indigenous identity, and its flexibility allows it to be applied in various local contexts.

Given that LGBTQ+ content is similarly siloed, Wheeler saw an opportunity to apply Brian Deer to help catalogue new collections for the library at the Spectrum Center. “That was going to be a huge undertaking,” she said. “I was so lucky to find that the Q Center has already done something similar.” She had discovered that Bellamy Jacobs, ’23, and current MLIS student Lexi Santiago had laid the groundwork for a queer library using Brian Deer’s principles.

Wheeler recently received a $2,500 award from the Linda J. Gould Endowed Fellowship for Children’s and Youth Services that will help her fulfill her goal of giving community to LGBTQ+ youth through librarianship. “It’s about creating a status quo that includes them, not just tolerates them. While I wasn’t able to provide that world for my niece during her lifetime, I like to think that the spaces I create for children like her will act as her legacy.”