November is Native American Heritage Month and the University Libraries will offer a variety of events and exhibits to mark the occasion. Can’t get to campus? You can still enjoy these rich resources offering a bounty of primary sources about first peoples, their history and culture.
North American Indian Thought and Culture was just added to the library collections. This remarkable resource brings together more than 100,000 pages, many of which are previously unpublished, rare, or hard to find. The project integrates autobiographies, biographies, Indian publications, oral histories, personal writings, photographs, drawings, and even audio files. The result is a comprehensive representation of historical events as told by the individuals who lived through them.
This database was originally named the North American Indian Biographical Database and individual biographies and oral histories are still its greatest strength. Biographies have been collected from more than 100 Indian publications, such as The Arrow, the Cherokee Phoenix, and the Chickasaw Intelligencer. The collection includes 2,000 oral histories presented in audio and transcript form. The database also offers at least 20,000 photographs from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Edward Curtis, and many rare collections.
Virtually all North American groups are represented—nearly 500 in all. Some nations are covered in great depth, including the Eskimos and Inuit of the Arctic; the sub-Arctic Cree; the Pacific Coastal Salish; the Ojibwa, Cheyenne, and Sioux of the Plains; the Luiseno, Pomo, and Miwok of California; the Apache, Navajo, and Hopi of the Southwest; the Creek and Cherokee of the Southeast; the Peqout, Iroquois, and Seneca of the Northeast; the Metis and Nez Perce of the Great Plateau; and others.
Like many resources produced by Alexander Street Press, the collection is indexed and searchable in novel ways, allowing researchers to explore by individual name, ethnic group, gender, geographical place, religion, occupation, and time period, North American Indian Thought and Culture will serve all those interested in serious scholarly research into the history of American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Canadian First Peoples.
North American Indian Thought and Culture joins several other databases of primary sources related to Native American history and culture, including:
- American Indian Histories and Cultures
This resource offers unique manuscripts and published material from the Newberry Library’s extensive Edward E. Ayer Collection; one of the strongest archival collections on American Indian history. The Ayer collection is truly vast, containing 130,000 volumes, over one million manuscript pages, 2,000 maps, 500 atlases, 11,000 photographs, and 3,500 drawings and paintings. - Early Encounters in North America
This database draws together primary source materials from the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries on the cultural encounters in the European exploration of and United States expansion into of the North American continent. Contains 1,482 authors and over 100,000 pages of letters, diaries, memoirs and accounts of early encounters. Users can search or browse by year, place, ethnic group, environment, cultural event, flora, fauna, or image. - Congressional Serial Set Online
The Congressional Serial Set Online offers more than 10 million pages from 13,800 volumes of House and Senate reports and documents, covering publications from the early State Papers series (1789-) through 1980.