Native American Studies

The collections highlighted here include digitized videos, images, paintings and oral history interviews relating to the history of Native American people. Many libraries and archives hold material that is considered to be culturally sensitive, or material of a confidential, sensitive or sacred nature, factors which are not covered by U.S. copyright laws. There are guidelines designed to help facilitate respectful use and dissemination of indigenous materials, including the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials and the Indigenous Digital Archive statement about respectful online access. Collections highlighted here, when applicable, reflect those guidelines and practices for respectful use and access.

• The Digital Public Library of America is a digital library that aggregates information on digitized archival materials from cultural heritage institutions across the U.S. The DPLA also has primary source collections that include curated sets of archival materials and teaching guides for classroom use. Some of the primary source sets on Native American history include:

  • Exploration of the Americas

  • Powhatan People and the English at Jamestown

  • The Wounded Knee Massacre 

  • Cherokee Removal and the Trail of Tears

  • The American Indian Movement, 1968-1978

DPLA also has an exhibition entitled History of Survivance: Upper Midwest 19th-Century Native American Narratives examining the dominant narratives around Native American history that are often present in archives and museums, looking at the resources in DPLA through a lens of Native American survivance in the Minnesota region.

• The American Antiquarian Society hosts From English to Algonquin: Early New England Translations, a project highlighting texts produced in early British colonies that put Native languages in print. These texts and other historical books are being used by Native communities in various language reclamation projects today.

• Independent Voices, an Open Access collection of digitized alternative press newspapers and periodicals, includes different Native American publications, including the Native American Rights Fund's NARF Legal Review and Native Movement, a Red Power newsletter out of Vancouver, BC. 

• The Indigenous Digital Archive is a growing digital archive presented by the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture in New Mexico. It contains over 500,000 archival documents about the Indian boarding schools established by the U.S. government.

• The Kim-Wait/Eisenberg Native American Literature Collection at Amherst College is the largest collection of Native books assembled by a private collector. They are in the process of digitizing books in the public domain, which can be seen at Amherst College Digital Collections. 

• The Library of Congress has digital collections on Native Americans, teaching resources to accompany their digitized holdings, and curated collections on subjects like wax cylinder recordings, early gelatin photographs, and other primary source documents.

• The Native Americans Oral History Program is a project from the Digital Library of the Caribbean and the University of Florida's Department of History and contains more than 85,000 pages of transcribed material from over 4,000 interviews with Native Americans across over six tribal affiliations. 

• The Native Northeast Portal is a project of The Yale Indian Papers Project that collects digitized primary source material on Native American history from several institutions across New England. You can browse this collection by community in addition to category and keyword browsing.

• Woven Into History is a digital public history project at the University of Texas at Austin that highlights the collection of donated 19th and 20th century Navajo rugs. It includes blog posts, lesson plans, and classroom activities in addition to the digital collections.