Skip to Main Content

Native American Resources in the Manuscript Division

Native Cultures

J.B.S. Indian Cowboy. Drawings by Native American schoolchildren, Fort Spokane Boarding School; Solon Hannibal Borglum papers. 1905. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division.

The Indigenous peoples of North America come from a multitude of communities with distinct cultural heritages. This page is separated into three groups of collections.

The first group covers Native Americans in art and literature. These collections hold the largest amount of material created directly by Native people, even though they mostly come to the Library secondhand through non-Native American collectors. Standout collections in this group include the Schoolcraft papers, which hold manuscript poems written by Ojibwe poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and evidence of her literary collaborations with her Euro-American husband, the Indian agent and ethnographer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. In visual art, the Vincent Price papers include documentation of the work of Native artists from various communities connected to Price's service on the Indian Arts and Crafts Board. Additionally, the Solon Hannibal Borglum papers contain a small collection of drawings made by Native children at the Fort Spokane Boarding School. The drawing entitled "Indian Cowboy", pictured on the right, comes from this collection. A sterling collection item is the iconographic Winter Count compiled as a mnemonic device for oral story telling purposes of Lakota/Brulé history by Battiste Good (Wapostangi, or Brown Hat) and his son, High Hawk.

The second group on this page gathers collections related to Native languages. These collections generally consist of vocabularies or samples of Native languages collected from Native speakers by white linguists and ethnologists, such as the extensive C. Hart Merriam papers documenting the Native languages of California and Nevada. Of particular interest are the Hugh Lenox Scott papers, which document the army officer's decades-long study and promotion of Plains Indian Sign Language, a sign language used for intertribal communication by both Deaf and hearing individuals from dozens of tribes on the Great Plains.

The final group on this page includes collections related to Native cultures that do not fit within the earlier groups. The name "Historians, Anthropologists, Ethnologists, and Other Students" reflects the provenance of these collections, which come almost exclusively from non-Native scholars who studied Native cultures and history. Standout collections in this group include the Pennell-Whistler collection, which documents fieldwork conducted by Passamaquoddy translator and Maine state representative Lewis Mitchell for the folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland. Also included are the partial records of the United States Work Projects Administration, including life histories from the Federal Writers' Project that are available online and include multiple interviews with Native narrators.

Tip: Search collection names in the community name index for a fuller list of specific communities mentioned in each collection.

Collections: Arts and Literature

The following collection titles link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links to additional online content, including finding aids for the collections, are included when available.

Collections: Native Languages

The following collection titles link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links to additional online content, including finding aids for the collections, are included when available.

Collections: Historians, Anthropologists, Ethnologists, and Other Students

The following collection titles link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links to additional online content, including finding aids for the collections, are included when available.