Native American Materials in the US Archives

Anderson, J., and Christen, K. (2013). ‘Chuck a Copyright on It’: Dilemmas of Digital Return and the Possibilities for Traditional Knowledge Licenses and Labels. Museum Anthropology Review 7(1–2), 105–126.

This article focuses on the creation of an innovate network of licenses and labels delivered through an accessible, educational, and informative digital platform aimed specifically at the complex intellectual property needs of Indigenous peoples, communities, and collectives wishing to manage, maintain, and preserve their digital cultural heritage. The Traditional Knowledge (TK) Licenses and Labels answer a grassroots, global call by Indigenous communities, archivists, museum specialists, and activists for an alternative to traditional copyright for the varied needs of Indigenous communities and the cultural materials they steward.

Christen, K. (2011). Opening Archives: Respectful Repatriation. The American Archivist 74, 185 -210.

This case study examines one collaborative archival project aimed at digitally repatriating and reciprocally curating cultural heritage materials of the Plateau tribes in the Pacific Northwest.

Christen, K. (2015). Tribal Archives, Traditional Knowledge, and Local Contexts: Why the “s” Matters. Journal of Western Archives, 6(1).

This article examines the landscape of tribal or indigenous archival management as related to digital assets and more specifically how these might help us reimagine the intellectual property needs of local, traditional, and indigenous communities, libraries, archives, and museums as they seek to manage, preserve and reuse their digital cultural heritage. Link here.

Christen, K. A. (2012). Mukurtu: An Indigenous archive and publishing tool. White Paper. Washington State University.

The Mukurtu project seeks to create prototype of an open source, standards-based, archiving and publishing tool adaptable to the local cultural protocols and complex intellectual property rights systems of Indigenous communities.

Cooper, A. (2002). Issues in native American archives. Collection Management, 27(2), 43-54.

Native American communities face extreme challenges in the archival preservation of their historical documents. This paper describes the author’s 1998 summer internship at the Hatathli Museum at Dine College on the Navajo Reservation and examines some of the archival community’s responses to these challenges and makes suggestions for further research.

Cushman, E. (2013). Wampum, Sequoyan, and story: Decolonizing the digital archive. College English, 76(2), 115-135.

Decolonizing the digital archive is a recent discussion within the past decade about transferring ownership and responsibility of collections from non-Native American information institutions to Native American information institutions. There is a striking difference of priorities that are distinguished between Western archival thought of tradition, collections, artifacts, and preservation and tribal notions of history, place, meaning, perseverance as tenets of thought for archival practices for cultural material. The Cherokee Nation has, so far, worked to deconstruct Western notions in archival practices of their cultural material. This step is important for Native American tribal nations in reclaiming authoritative representation over their cultural materials and share it from their perspective within their own archive

DeLucia, C. (2018). Fugitive Collections in New England Indian Country: Indigenous Material Culture and Early American History Making at Ezra Stiles’s Yale Museum. The William and Mary Quarterly 75(1), 109–150.

This article revisits a "lost" museum once situated at Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut where Ezra Stiles and other eighteenth-century collegiate affiliates assembled a wide-ranging collection of objects, including Indigenous items from local and more distant communities. The article appraises how such sites can be used to convey multivocal histories of Indigenous entanglements with evolving forms of settler colonialism and to better recognize tribal communities' long-standing practices of material interpretation and caretaking.

Duarte, M. E., & Belarde-Lewis, M. (2015). Imagining: Creating spaces for indigenous ontologies. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 53(5-6), 677-702.

For at least half a century, catalogers have struggled with how to catalog and classify Native American and Indigenous peoples’ materials in library, archive, and museum collections. Understanding how colonialism works can help those in the field of knowledge organization appreciate the power dynamics embedded in the marginalization of Native American and Indigenous peoples materials through standardization, misnaming, and other practices.

Jones, Z. R. (2015). Images of the Surreal: Contrived Photographs of Native American Indians in Archives and Suggested Best Practices. Journal of Western Archives, 6(1).

This essay explores the complex history of contrived photographs of Native American Indians created by non-Native photographers around the turn of the twentieth century. The essay offers perspectives and survey feedback on practices that could improve archival description of historical photographs of American Indians. Link here

Kim, D. J. and Wernimont, J. 2014. ‘Performing Archive’: Identity, Participation, and Responsibility in the Ethnic Archive. Archive Journal (April 2014).

This essay raises questions regarding the liberal discourse of digital access that seems at times to overshadow opportunities for critical intervention at this moment of digital-archive fever. It reorients the issues of archival agency an considers the ways in which recent paradigm shifts in the archival practice with respect to Native American materials can contribute to the discussion about issues of cultural representation and its relationship to scholarly design. Link here.

Leopold, R. (2013). Articulating Culturally Sensitive Knowledge Online: A Cherokee Case Study. Museum Anthropology Review 7(1-2), 85-104.

This article discusses a collaboration between the Museum of the Cherokee Indian and the Smithsonian Institution in a digital repatriation project involving an extensive body of 19th and 20th century manuscripts. The Cherokee knowledge repatriation project offers a novel model for the circulation of digital heritage materials.

Lewis, D. G. (2015). Natives in the Nation’s Archives: The Southwest Oregon Research Project. Journal of Western Archives, 6(1).

The Southwest Oregon Research Project, initiated by members of the Coquille Indian tribe broke ground in Oregon for archival collections. Tribal scholars, working to restore and support their tribal nations collected documents and learned skills of archival research and organization. The last phase of the project returned collections to regional tribes in a community process of potlatch. The project theory reversed the trend of the late 19th and early 20th centuries of collecting information from tribes with little or no reciprocity. Link here. 

Mills, A. (2017). Learning to Listen: Archival Sound Recordings and Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual property. Archivaria, 83(1), 109-124.

Although unpublished ethnographic field recordings of Indigenous songs, stories, and oral histories can seem like straightforward cases for access, these recordings exist in a unique ethical context. This is characterized by the historic power imbalance between Indigenous nations, non-Indigenous researchers, and settler-colonial state powers, as well as a clash between Western intellectual property law and Indigenous legal orders. This article explores the nature of Indigenous cultural and intellectual property in sound archives, aiming to increase understanding and acknowledgement of Indigenous protocols in the archival profession.

Montgomery, L. M., & Fowles, S. (2020). An Indigenous Archive: Documenting Comanche History through Rock Art. American Indian Quarterly, 44(2), 196-220.

This article argues that Biographic-style rock art is a historical text in its own right. Composed by and for Native people, this iconographic tradition is an "Indigenous archive" that can be read by archaeologists in collaboration with Indigenous community members. A close examination of these images, accompanied by conversations with Comanche tribal members, offers historical insights into the process of constructing and interpreting Indigenous history.

Nakata, Martin (2012) Indigenous memory, forgetting and the archives. Archives and Manuscripts, 40(2), 98-105, DOI: 10.1080/01576895.2012.687129

This article is about the contemporary issues facing Indigenous people in Australia, the emergence of a new politics of identity and who can count today as Indigenous. The important role of the archives for Indigenous people is positioned in this reflective piece, not just as a resource for rediscovering peoples’ past, but also as the beginning point for leaving behind the negative historical tags of the ‘disadvantaged’ and moving towards a more grounded future on Indigenous terms.

O'Neal, J. R. (2015). "The Right to Know:" Decolonizing Native American Archives. Journal of Western Archives, 6(1). 

This work examines the historic and current policies regarding Native American archives, detailing the broader historic landscape of information services for tribal communities, the initiative to develop tribal archives in Indian Country, and the activism surrounding the proper care and management of Native American archive collections at non-Native repositories. Utilizing Vine Deloria's "Right to Know" call to action, the paper analyzes major activities and achievements of the national indigenous archives movement with a specific focus on archival activists and tribal communities in the American West. Available here: 

Powell, T. B. (2016). Digital Knowledge Sharing: Forging Partnerships between Scholars, Archives, and Indigenous Communities. Museum Anthropology Review 10(2), 66–99.

The article reviews a digital repatriation project carried out by the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at the American Philosophical Society. The project focused on building digital archives in four indigenous communities: Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Penobscot Nation, Tuscarora Nation, and Ojibwe communities in both the United States and Canada. The article features insights from traditional knowledge keepers who helped to create a new system of co-stewarding the APS’ indigenous archival materials and recounts how the APS established protocols for cultural sensitivity. Preprint here.

Schweitzer, I. (2015). Native Sovereignty and the Archives: Samson Occom and Digital Humanities. Resources for American Literary Study 38, 21–52.

This essay describes The Occom Circle, a scholarly digital edition of documents held at Dartmouth College by and about Samson Occom (1723–92), a Mohegan Indian, Presbyterian minister, political activist, and the foremost Native writer in eighteenth-century North America. Framing this project with the themes of Native sovereignty, the politics of archives, and the affordances of the digital, the essay argues that archives can reveal and preserve the often-ephemeral affective structures of colonial relations, and that digital technology can offer methodologies that embrace the evolving nature of knowledge.

Trammell, K. (2019). The Indigenous Arts Archive: Indigenizing the Spencer Museum of Art’s Database. 

The Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas stewards over 3,000 works by Native North American peoples, along with another 7,500 art works in the Global Indigenous Collections. The Indigenous Arts Archive aims at including Indigenous voices in the Spencer’s database, to treat Indigenous knowledge as equal to academic knowledge; to build relationships with Indigenous communities and individuals; and to increase the use of the Spencer’s Native North American collections. Link here

Tusler, M. (2018). Toward a Native Archive: Chicago's Relocation Photos, Indian Labor, and Indigenous Public Text. American Indian Quarterly, 42(3), 375-410.

Between 1953 and 1957 the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) began what it called the “relocation project,” which moved American Indians from rural reservations to major American urban centers. The BIA maintained an archive of photographs of relocatees and produced pamphlets, internal documents, newsletters, and other bureaucratic material. The project explores an aesthetics of the ordinary that demands rethinking the work of photography in the twentieth century and contributes to ongoing conversations in the construction of Native archives.

ArchiveGrid  is a collection of over five million archival material descriptions, including MARC records from WorldCat and finding aids harvested from the web, from over 1,000 different archival institutions.

ProQuest History Vault  unlocks the wealth of key archival materials with a single search. Researchers can access digitized letters, papers, photographs, scrapbooks, financial records, diaries, and many more primary source materials taken from the University Publications of America (UPA) Collections.

ProQuest Indian Claims provides access Indian Claims Commission (ICC) materials and traces the history of Indian claims by Indian Nation from 1789 to present. HASKELL'S ACCESS HERE

American Indian Archives & Libraries 

A list of American Indian archives and Library from FamilySearch

DPLA is a US project aimed at providing public access to digital holdings in order to create a large-scale public digital library. 

The HeinOnline Academic package features more than 124 million pages of content and covers more than 100 subject areas, provides access to 300+ years of information on political development and the complete history of the creation of government and legal systems around the world. HASKELL'S ACCESS HERE

Academic Search Premier is a leading multidisciplinary research database. It provides access to full-text journals, magazines and other valuable resources. HASKELL'S ACCESS HERE. 

Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.

HathiTrust Digital Library is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries including content digitized via Google Books and the Internet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locally by libraries.

JSTOR  is a digital library founded in 1995 in New York City, United States. It provides full-text searches of almost 2,000 journals. HASKELL'S ACCESS HERE