Select Native American and Indigenous Studies Projects

American Indian Digital History Project: "a Digital History Cooperative founded to recover and preserve rare indigenous newspapers, photographs, and archival materials from all across north America." Currently, the site contains mostly tribal newspapers from the mid-late twentieth century, but they are hoping to serve as a "digital repository for local Tribes." The site is housed within the University of Nebraska's History Department. For a list of contributors, see here. 

Keywords: Newspapers, twentieth century, Native American, American Indian, 

American Indians of the Pacific Northeast: a database run by the University of Washington Libraries that "includes 2,300 original photos as well as over 1,500 pages from the Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior from 1851 to 1908 and six Indian treaties negotiated in 1855." Also includes bibliographies, pedagogical tools, and maps. For a list of contributors, see here.

Keywords: Pacific Northwest, Treaties, Photographs, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century, American Indian, Native American, Maps, Pedagogy, 

Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center: A site run by Dickinson College that includes student files, images, and other documents related to the Carlisle Indian school. The site also includes a number of pedagogical resources. For a list of contributors, see here.

Keywords: Boarding schools, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century, Lakota, Ojibwe, Seneca, Oneida, Cherokee, Pennsylvania, 

Database of Indigenous Slavery in the Americas (DISA): a database that “seeks to document as many instances of indigenous enslavement in the Americas between 1492 and 1900 (and beyond where relevant).” The site is currently being developed.

Edward E. Ayer Digital Collection:  More than 100,000 digitized images from the Newberry's Edward E. Ayer collection -- "one of the world's premiere sources of primary documents on American Indians." For the database of images, see here. For the printed book collection, see here. 

Keywords: Newberry, Photography, Books, American Indian, Native American

Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian: A digital, searchable version of Curtis's well-known work that includes Curtis's photographs and twenty volumes of text. Site is hosted by the Northwestern University Digital Library Collections.

Keywords: Photography, "Vanishing Race," American Indian, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century, 

Indigenous Digital Archive: a digital archive containing over "500,000 archival documents about Santa Fe Indian School, 1920, all kinds of boarding school records, and letters." The site is maintained by the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, the New Mexico State Library Tribal Libraries Program, and the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. For a list of contributors, see here.

Keywords: Boarding schools, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century, Southeast, Pueblo, Zuni, Navajo, Dine, Photographs, Letters, Records, American Indian, Native American 

Performing Archive: Curtis + "the vanishing race": an interpretive site that aggregates "several existing archival visual, material, and sonic collections based on the work of Edward S. Curtis." Produced by the Claremont Center for Digital Humanities, the site intends to facilitate an ongoing conversation with tribal members, academics, students, and others about the Curtis images. 

Keywords: Curtis, Performance, Photography, Twentieth Century, American Indian, Native American, First Nations, 

Plains Indian Ledger Art: a site containing high resolution copies of Plain's Indian ledger books. The project is housed in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego and contains digitized images of thousands of ledger art drawing originally created between 1860 and 1900. Site also contains articles and essays about ledger art in general as well as analysis on specific works. 

Keywords: Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century, Plains, Images, Arapaho, Southern Cheyenne, Northern Cheyenne, Kiowa, Lakota, 

Walter McClintock Glass Lantern Slides: A database of "thousands of photographs of the Blackfoot and their homelands in northwestern Montana." Photographs taken by Walter McClintock between 1896 and 1916. Site is housed by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University.  

Keywords: Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century, Indigenous, Blackfeet, Montana, Photographs, Yale, Native American, American Indian 

Yale Indian Papers Project: (in process of transitioning to the Native Northeast Portal): A site maintained by Yale University containing primary source documents from many Northeastern Tribes. The documents span nearly 400 years and include letters, maps, photographs, as well as government documents and other primary sources. Site is housed at the Yale Divinity School. The editorial team is listed here. 

Keywords: Northeast, New England, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Narragansett, Mohegan, Pequot, Abenaki, Nipmuc, Seventeenth Century, Eighteenth Century, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century, Native American, American Indian

Language Guides:

Beginning Dakota: Twenty-four Dakota language and grammar lessons with recordings from Dakota speakers. Site is facilitated by the Minnesota Historical Society.

Khoiye Tdoen Gyah — Kiowa Talk: a project of the Kiowa Clemente Course in the Humanities at the University of Oklahoma. Site created with the collaboration of several elders that includes video or Kiowa sounds, phrases, as well as stories and songs.

Ojibwe People’s Dictionary: Ojibwe dictionary and cultural resource created and maintained by the University of Minnesota’s Department of American Indian Studies, the University Libraries, and editor John D. Nichols.

WoLakota Project: Lakota Language Guide facilitated by the South Dakota Department of Education that also includes classroom lessons, films, interviews, and oral histories.

Oral History Collections:

The Digital Collections of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program —Native American Interviews: a collection maintained by the University of Florida’s Department of History containing “approximately 4,000 interviews and more than 85,000 pages of transcribed material.” Focus is on oral histories and documents from the Catawba, Cherokee, Lumber, Mississippi Choctaw, Seminole, and Urban Lumbee.

Teaching Resources:

Native Knowledge 360: site maintained by the National Museum of the American Indian containing lesson guides and resources for K-12 educators.