Most people who come to the Library for the first time to research a particular topic find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the collections and the multiple formats of material found here. The first-time user will also discover that rare books and nonbook materials must be accessed through particular reading rooms.
Acoma Pueblo woman by Laura Gilpin, 1939, shows the eclectic style of dressing adopted by women in the Southwest in the early 20th century.
In order to connect related materials from different administrative divisions and formats and thus encourage broader public use of these unparalleled collections, the Library has been producing a series of resource guides by major subject categories.
The latest in the series, Many Nations: A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Indian and Alaska Native Peoples of the United States, is the result of a six-year effort by a team of staff members -- including librarians, reference and curatorial specialists, historians, analysts, attorneys and editors. Generously illustrated (170 illustrations, of which 50 are in color), this 340-page guide is designed to help orient researchers to different aspects of Indian studies and provide ideas for further inquiry by scholars and lay people alike -- as well as navigate their journeys through the Library's collections. This guide was preceded by Keys to the Encounter (1992), The African-American Mosaic (1993) and The Largest Event (1994); others are being planned.
Materials for the study of American Indians at the Library of Congress reflect its 200-year commitment to collect written and recorded evidence of U.S. history. Generally strongest in accounts of Indian-white relations, the collections also include the largest body of Indian recordings in the country. The guide focuses exclusively on North American Indians, excluding Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean, and the material is presented much as a researcher would approach any large subject at the Library, beginning with an introduction to general book collections in the Main Reading Room and continuing through all the specialized collections divisions. Each section includes an overview of materials held and their relevance to researchers, reading room information, directions for access through print and online catalogs, guides, bibliographies and an annotated list of selected collections.
To help launch researchers on subject searches across the Library's specialized collections and reading rooms, mini-essays act as "Gateways" to topics strongly supported by the collections. Strategically located throughout the guide, these sidebars provide historical context and directives to relevant divisions. In addition, each special collection chapter is followed by a portfolio of color and black-and-white illustrations of selected materials, indicating both chronological parameters and expected and unexpected formats resulting from overlaps in collection policies. A detailed index provides subject, proper name and geographical access, with particular focus on American Indian individuals and tribes mentioned in the book.
Robert Latham Owen, an enrolled Cherokee, the second Indian elected to the U.S. Senate and one of the first two senators elected from Oklahoma, in a c. 1908 photo.
In addition to maintaining and expanding its own comprehensive collections, the Library serves as a referral center through its extensive guides and bibliographies to other repositories of research materials for the study of American Indians and Alaska Natives. And many collections related to American Indian study throughout the Americas and Europe are represented in whole or in part in the Library's rich microform collections. A 26-reel microfilm collection of FBI files on the American Indian Movement (AIM) is among many microfilms described in the guide, which can be accessed through the Microform Reading Room and other specialized reading rooms.
Not only do the Library's holdings include many thousands of books and periodicals with information on North American Indians, but the Library has one of the largest and most varied collections of manuscripts relating to American history, in which Native Americans play an integral role. Other special holdings include prints, photographs, broadsides, posters, maps, government documents, laws and legal materials, films, videos, television programs, microfilm and sound recordings.
Inevitably, amid such a wealth of material, certain treasures stand out. The Library's Serial and Government Publications Division holds rare copies of the first American Indian newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, which commenced in 1828. It was edited and published in New Echota, Ga., by Elias Boudinot, a Cherokee schoolteacher and missionary. Its text was in both English and Cherokee, the latter using the brand-new syllabary devised by Sequoyah. Boudinot insisted on publishing accounts of divisions within the tribe over moving west to Indian territory. This and his own advocacy for removal were seen as treachery by certain tribal leaders, resulting in his assassination shortly after he arrived in Indian Territory. In the first issue, Boudinot called for a time when "all the Indian tribes of America shall rise, Phoenix-like, from their ashes, and when terms like 'Indian depredations,' 'war whoops,' 'scalping knife,' and the like shall become obsolete and forever buried 'under deep ground.'"
Visual materials are among the richest and most attractive of the sources documenting Indian customs and history. The earliest description and illustration of American Indians appears in two printed copies, held by the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, of the 1493 Christopher Columbus letter -- the illustrated version was published in Basel in 1494 -- announcing his discovery of the Americas and calling the people there "los Indios." The Rare Book Division contains numerous accounts, many illustrated, of early European encounters with Indian peoples, as well as first editions of the great Indian portfolios compiled by such artists as Charles Bird King, George Catlin and Karl Bodmer in the 1830s and 1840s. These pioneering efforts depicting tribal leaders and customs in paintings, later to be reproduced as color lithographs, provide visual evidence of proud civilizations that were increasingly being devastated by diseases and warfare.
By the time the great photographer Edward S. Curtis embarked at the turn of the century on his 30-year crusade to photograph all the remaining tribes west of the Mississippi, some of the tribes depicted by the earlier artists were tragically reduced and their lifestyles irrevocably changed. Nonetheless, Curtis managed to make more memorable photographs than any other photographer of American Indians. The Library's Prints and Photographs Division has one of the largest collections of first-generation Curtis prints in the country. The division also holds other large and small collections of photographs of American Indians, but its relevant graphic material begins with a 1645 etching by Wenceslaus Hollar of an Algonquian from Virginia; it is considered to be one of the earliest portraits of a Native American drawn and engraved from life.
Left, the Library's Serial and Government Publications Division holds rare copies of the first American Indian newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, 1828; below, the Constitution and Laws of the Cherokee Nation (in Cherokee), 1839, is one of the treasures found in the Law Library's rare book collection.
Among important materials held by the Manuscript Division are records of colonial administrations and of missionary organizations, both in original and microfilm formats. Outstanding among missionary archives are the records of the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church in Alaska, which chart its efforts (in Russian) from the 18th century forward to convert and Russify the native populations of the region. Elsewhere in the Manuscript collection, the voluminous papers of ethnologist and Indian agent Henry Rowe Schoolcraft represent an early attempt to document the customs and lifestyles of the tribes of the Great Lakes region before displacement by European culture. On the other hand, a remarkable winter count by Battiste Good, a Brulé Sioux, provides a 700-year record in pictographs of his people's existence on the plains, including the arrival of horses and the resulting change in lifestyle.
Researchers tracing complex legislative history while building cases involving Indian claims will find that the Law Library of Congress holds extensive compilations of federal, state, tribal and international laws, as well as related legal and legislative resources. These are supported further by the Library's wider collections, for example in presidential, executive, legislative and judicial papers held by the Manuscript Division, in the Indian treaties held by several divisions and in maps of Indian territories in the Geography and Map Division. The Law Library's Rare Book collection includes Colonial laws, some applying directly to Indians. For example, The Book of the General Laws of the Inhabitants of the Jurisdiction of New Plimouth (1685) includes a section devoted to giving equal protection to the property of Indians. Its collection of tribal laws and constitutions includes Constitution and Laws of the Chickasaw Nation Together with Treaties of 1832, 1833, 1834, 1837, 1852, 1855 and 1861, published as two volumes in 1899 in Parsons, Kan. -- one in Chickasaw and one in English. The Law Library also holds printed reports of government-funded expeditions, many of which include vibrant illustrations and accounts of Indian tribes encountered, as well as maps of routes taken and descriptions of the land, flora and fauna of the area.
Maps are among the most potentially rich sources for the study of Indians and are often overlooked. The vast collections of the Geography and Map Division include two original manuscripts by Indian mapmakers. One depicts the battle near Fort Duquesne between Gen. Edward Braddock's British forces and the French and their Indian allies on July 9, 1755. Many maps that are not normally considered to be resources for Indian studies include unexpected evidence of Indian settlement, distribution and culture. For example, a manuscript map of Manhattan and vicinity drawn in about 1665 after a 1639 work by the great Dutch cartographer Johannes Vingboons shows four longhouses representing Indian villages in the area that became Brooklyn. The map made by Jesuit missionary Father P.J. De Smet, and held by the Geography and Map Division, shows tribal lands in the western United States and may have been made in conjunction with the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1851. A portrait of a signer of the treaty, the Crow Chief Big Robber, appears at the top of the map. Many other maps show the inexorable loss of Indian land, and the removal of tribes to reservations, in the face of occupation by white settlers and through the mechanism of treaties with the U.S. government. In addition to the broad collection held by the Geography and Map Division, significant maps also can be found in other Library collections, such as the general collections, Rare Book and Special Collections, and the Law Library.
Far left; The papers of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, a 19th century ethnologist and Indian agent, document the lives of tribes from the Great Lakes region of North America. Left; This map of the Kaibab Indian Reservation in Arizona is typical of the maps produced by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1944. Right; Inuit children under a fish drying rack in Nome, Alaska, 1906. Frank Nowell documented life among the Tlingit and Inuit peoples from 1904 to 1910. Far right; We Remember Wounded Knee, 1890-1973, from the Yankee Poster Collection, in the Prints and Photographs Division, is based on a woodcut by Bruce Carter.
The changing perceptions and images of American Indians by non-Indians is an example of a topic that can be traced across the Library's collections. Stereotypical portrayals have been pervasive since the first European accounts in the 16th century and the images engraved by Theodor de Bry and others based on these accounts -- and they continue today. These images changed over time to reflect particular political or social trends, such as the Manifest Destiny of land-hungry settlers and speculators and drastic changes in federal policies. For example, movies -- like the dime novels before them -- shaped the perceptions (or misperceptions) of America's native peoples, perpetuating the good and bad images of Indian peoples: the treacherous savage or the noble savage; the doomed victim of Euro-American society or the honorable avenger of that society's wrongdoers; the faithful companion or the faithless heathen.
With the continuing pressure of the civil rights movement, the film industry began to address cultural sensitivity in the 1970s. Tribal consultants and Indian actors were hired; scripts attempted to reflect historical accuracy and a native viewpoint; and stereotypes were countered by less prejudiced representations of Indian people. Documentary filmmakers, especially independents, became the most powerful force in transforming images of American Indians, both in commercial and public broadcast arenas. All of these trends can be traced through the voluminous collections of documentaries, newsreels, television programs and feature films held by the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. These collections begin with films of Indian peoples made in the 1890s to be shown in vaudeville theaters on Thomas Alva Edison's kinetoscopic equipment and continue to the documentaries being made today by Indians themselves.
Recordings of Native American spoken traditions, songs and dance ceremonies are increasingly sought after by those making documentaries and CD-ROMs. The Recorded Sound Center of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division provides access to about 3 million sound recordings and radio broadcasts that can be searched for Indian material using reference tools for subject searching. The Library's principal collection of recorded American Indian materials is held in the American Folklife Center. Established within the Library by an act of Congress in 1976, the center is charged with the preservation and presentation of American folklife and holds more than 45,000 hours of ethnographic sound recordings, of which approximately 1,500 hundred hours are Native American. The emphasis of these recordings is on oral traditions, both spoken and sung, but they also document dance and ceremonial complexes. One of the initiatives undertaken by the center has been the dissemination of copies of American Indian cylinder recordings to the communities of origin, bringing the value of these collections full circle to the originators. After receiving recordings from the center in 1986, Robert Youngdeer, Principal Chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, wrote: "Isn't it nice that some people years ago had the forethought to record the sounds and now our friends return to us a part of our ancient history."
Many Nations (Stock Number 030-000-00274-1) can be ordered through the Superintendent of Documents, P.O. Box 371954, Pittsburgh, PA 15250-7954. Its $33 price includes shipping and handling and can be paid by check or charged to Visa, MasterCard or Discover/NOVUS.
