Native American and Indigenous Studies

Updated monthly. Provides full-text coverage of newspapers, magazines and journals of the alternative and independent press in America. Includes a broad range of critical issues confronting contemporary society, such as ecology and the environment, grassroots organizing, labor, indigenous peoples, and public policy.

Provide access to source materials on the development of the American West. Contains a wide range of documents, including original manuscripts, ephemeral material (trade cards, wanted posters, photos, claim certificates, news-sheets etc), maps, and rare printed works. Topics covered include Native Americans, pioneers and homesteaders, mining, the Mormon Exodus, transportation, outlaws, the environment, and border issues.

Digitized content selected from The Graff Collection of Western Americana at The Newberry Library in Chicago.

Access to this resource is funded by the Emily Knauss Library Endowment for the Liberal Arts.

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From 1717 through 1836 the governments of Spain and Mexico collected in San Antonio de Bexar (when that city was the capital of Texas under Spanish and Mexican rule) an amazing series of official documents detailing the military, civilian, and political life of the Spanish province of Texas and the Mexican state of Coahuila y Texas. These records, which have become known as the Bexar Archives, constitute the most complete and detailed primary source in existence for the study of colonial Texas. The Archives, housed at the University of Texas at Austin, consist of 250,000 pages of manuscript documentation and more than 4,000 pages of printed material on colonial and regional history. The collection includes:

Bexar Archives: Publications and General Manuscript Series, 1717-1836
Bexar Archives: Translations [1699-1812]

Updated quarterly (until completed). Contains early accounts of exploration, discovery, travel, environment, peoples, and cultures in North America. Currently contains 1,076 authors and approximately 83,000 pages of material. When complete the product will include more than 100,000 pages of letters, diaries, memoirs and accounts of early encounters. Particular care has been taken to index the material so that it can be used in new ways. For example, you can identify all encounters between the French and the Huron between 1650 and 1700. The collection is centered on present-day Canada and the United States with some limited coverage of Mexico.

Ethnographic film, documentaries, and shorts made by and for Indigenous peoples and communities. Emphasis is on the human effects of climate change, sustainability, indigenous and local ways of interpreting history, cultural change, and traditional knowledge and storytelling. Local material covered includes Australia, New Zealand, Papua Niu Gini (also known as Papua New Guinea), Solomon Islands and other regions. Content has been sourced from several collections including National Film & Sound Archive of Australia, SBS, Mexican Film Board, and National Film Board of Canada.

This online collection brings together documents from 16 archives and libraries from around the world and the geographical spread of material allows scholars to take either a comparative approach or focus on a particular region. The collection deals with some of the major themes of frontier existence including: Settlement development, law and order, violence, expeditions and exploration, relations with indigenous peoples, trade and commerce, death and disease, missionaries and religion, women’s history, military matters, mining, gold rushes, settler governance, contested boundaries, agriculture and livestock.

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North American Indigenous journalism spanning two centuries.. Features periodicals produced in the United States and Canada, including Alaska, Arizona, British Columbia, California, Nevada and Oklahoma, from 1828 to 2016.

Updated regularly. Contains bibliographic information and abstracts of health-related articles, reports, surveys, and other resource documents pertaining to the health and health care of American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Canadian First Nations. Provides information for the benefit, use, and education of organizations and individuals with an interest in health-related issues, programs, and initiatives regarding North American indigenous peoples.

A collection of biographical material of American Indians and Canadian First Peoples in their own words and through the words of others. Includes biographies, autobiographies, personal narratives, speeches, diaries, letters, oral histories, reference works, manuscripts, photographs and audio files.Sources include rare books and biographies 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 and at least 20,000 photographs from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Edward Curtis, and many rare collections.

Provides over 14,000 primary source titles based on Joseph Sabin's bibliography, Bibliotheca Americana. Materials describe every aspect of life in the Western Hemisphere from 1500 to the 1890s. Included are books, pamphlets, serials and other documents that provide original accounts of exploration, trade, colonialism, slavery and abolition, the western movement, Native Americans, military actions and much more. Searchable in a variety of ways, including: author, title, year of publication, and subject.