The Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection is one of the premier libraries in the world focused on Latin America and Latinx/e Studies. This guide points researchers to some of the best resources for general and archival research on Latin American Indigenous language materials and Indigenous Studies at the Benson and more broadly. Check the tabs on the left for relevant sources that can serve as starting points for any topic you are researching.
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A digital archive of recordings and texts in and about the indigenous languages of Latin America. Includes recordings of naturally-occurring discourse in a wide range of genres, including narratives, ceremonies, oratory, conversations, and songs. Many of these recordings are accompanied by transcriptions and translations in either Spanish, English, or Portuguese. Also collects materials about these languages, such as grammars, dictionaries, ethnographies, and research notes.
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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.
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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.
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Updated monthly. Provides full-text coverage of newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press in America (some international coverage). Includes more than 400,000 full-text articles from 200 publications.
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Updated quarterly. Brings together into one searchable resource Anthropological Literature from Harvard University and Anthropological Index from Royal Anthropological Institute in the UK. Provides worldwide indexing of journal articles, reports, commentaries, edited works, and obituaries in the fields of social, cultural, physical, biological, and linguistic anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, folklore, material culture, and interdisciplinary studies. Offers coverage of all core periodicals in the field in addition to local and lesser-known journals.
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Provides descriptions of the rich archival, manuscript, and museum collections in repositories across the state which are available to the public. Consists of the collection descriptions or "finding aids" that archives, libraries, and museums create to assist users in locating information in their collections. Consider these an extended table of contents which describe unique materials only available at the individual repositories. In most cases, the collections themselves are NOT available online.
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Updated daily. Searches complete text of books from selected library collections and publishers. Search works just like a regular Google search -- when book content contains a match for selected search terms, Google provides links to it in the search results. Depending on a few factors, Google displays everything from a few short excerpts to the entire book.
Each book includes an "About this book" page with basic bibliographic data like title, author, publication date, length and subject. For some books, additional information like key terms and phrases, references to the book from scholarly publications or other books, chapter titles and a list of related books.
The Benson Latin American Collection has a large collection of books published about and in indigenous languages. To find books on your topic, search using keywords to find books on your topic, and when you find a good result, look at the record under the ‘subject’ line and click on relevant subject to find all of the books on that particular topic (ex. Quechua language).
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