In addition to ethnographic collections recorded within tribal communities, AFC's archive is home to collections stemming from public events featuring Indigenous peoples, their communities, music, and dances. Some of these collections are the result of public programming sponsored by the Center, while others may originate from public programming by other organizations and communities that later donated recordings of these events to the archive.
Since its inception in 1976, the American Folklife Center has routinely hosted public programs at the Library of Congress in the form of concerts, lectures, panels, and symposia. From 2006 on, most of these public programs have been video-recorded and made available online.
To aid in navigation, the public programming collections presented in this guide have been grouped into several subcategories:
In addition to collections accessible through these pages, links to episodes and posts about Indigenous collections on the American Folklife Center's Folklife Today podcast and blog can be found under the "Additional Resources" page.
A list of upcoming and past Library events, some involving Indigenous peoples of the Americas, can be found here. These events include both AFC-sponsored concerts and lectures as well as events sponsored by other Library divisions. When these events are documented by the American Folklife Center, they become collections that can be found via searches in the Library's online catalog.
