LibGuides: History: Primary Sources by Era or Topic: American Indian and Indigenous history

Bibliography

Bibliography of Indigenous Peoples in North America. This link opens in a new window
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1500s-
Bibliography on Native American history, life, and culture.
Produced in partnership with the Human Relations Area File (HRAF), this database contains citations to magazine and journal articles, monographs, dissertations, and U.S. and Canadian government documents.

European Views of the Americas: 1493 to 1750
Citations from the Alden-Landis bibliography which lists documents printed in Europe that make some mention of the discovery and emerging awareness of the Americas.
UNLV Libraries media guide (2010)
Dated list of media resources on Native American topics available here.

Nevada newspapers

Nevada newspapers online

Schools

Stewart Indian School Oral History Project
Oral history transcripts from University of Nevada, Reno Libraries.

Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival: a history of the Stewart Indian School, 1890-2020 by Samantha M. Williams
ISBN: 1496232011
Publication Date: 2022
Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival illustrates how settler colonialism propelled U.S. government programs designed to assimilate generations of Native children at the Stewart Indian School (1890-1980). The school opened in Carson City, Nevada, in 1890 and embraced its mission to destroy the connections between Native children and their lands, isolate them from their families, and divorce them from their cultures and traditions. Newly enrolled students were separated from their families, had their appearances altered, and were forced to speak only English. However, as Samantha M. Williams uncovers, numerous Indigenous students and their families subverted school rules, and tensions arose between federal officials and the local authorities charged with implementing boarding school policies.
Collaborative Archaeology at Stewart Indian School by Sarah E. Cowie; Diane L. Teeman; Christopher C. LeBlanc
Call Number: Lied Library Book Stacks E97.6.C24 C65 2019
ISBN: 9781948908252
Publication Date: 2019
In Collaborative Archaeology at Stewart Indian School, the team's collective efforts shed light on the children's education, foodways, entertainment, health, and resilience in the face of the US government's attempt to forcibly assimilate Native populations at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as school life in later years after reforms. This edited volume addresses the theory, methods, and outcomes of collaborative archaeology conducted at the Stewart Indian School site and is a genuine collective effort between archaeologists, tribal members, and former students.
Changed Forever by Arnold Krupat
ISBN: 9781438469157
Publication Date: 2018
Changed Forever is the first study to gather a range of texts produced by Native Americans who, voluntarily or through compulsion, attended government-run boarding schools in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries.

Fort Mohave Indian School records
The Fort Mojave Indian School Records (1890-1923) consist of correspondence, finance and administrative records, pump station blueprints, and policy implementation and fact finding records. The school served the Hualapai and Mojave Indians at a site near present-day Kingman, Arizona.
Moapa River Indian School Annual Reports in UNLV Libraries Collection on the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe
Department of the Interior, United States Indian Service 1911 annual report of the conditions on the Moapa River Reservation School. Section I includes reservation law and order. Section II includes reservation health. Section III includes the reservation school. Section IV includes reservation industries (infrastructure).

Native American history primary source collections

Access U.S. News: Ethnic Newspapers This link opens in a new window
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2005-
Newspapers serving religious, ethnic and cultural groups in the US.
Indigenous Histories and Cultures in North America This link opens in a new window
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1400-1950s
Primary sources for American Indian history in the United States, Canada and Mexico. Manuscripts, artwork and rare printed books from pre-contact through the mid-20th century.
Indigenous Newspapers in North America This link opens in a new window
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1828-2016
Includes national periodicals as well as local community news and student publications from an Indigenous perspective.
American Indians and the American West This link opens in a new window
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1809-1971
Primary source collections from the US National Archives and other sources, including 20th century Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and records from the Major Council Meetings of American Indian Tribes.
See research guide describing full contents.
American West This link opens in a new window
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1830-1939
Pamphlets, maps, books, ephemeral material and rare printed sources related to the history of the American West.
Part of Americana combined search portal
Ethnic NewsWatch This link opens in a new window
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1959-
Articles, editorials, and reviews from the ethnic, minority, and native press.
Ethnic NewsWatch is an interdisciplinary, bilingual (English and Spanish) and comprehensive full text database of the newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press. Designed to provide the "other side of the story," ENW titles offer additional viewpoints from those proffered by the mainstream press.
Frontier Life: Borderlands, Settlement and Colonial Encounters This link opens in a new window
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1650-1920
Primary sources like expedition records, letters, diaries and government records from Europeans creating colonies in North America, Africa, and Australasia.
Indian Claims Insight 1789-2016 This link opens in a new window
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1789-
A one-of-a-kind research tool that provides researchers with the opportunity to understand and analyze Native American migration and resettlement throughout U.S. history, as well as U.S. Government Indian removal policies and subsequent actions to address Native American claims.
The database allows users to research the history of U.S. Indian claims from 1789 to the present. Unique compiled docket histories provide legal researchers with the ability to search the full text of all content related to each claim. Depending on the claim, the content can include not only court documents but also cited treaties, related congressional publications, and maps.
Military & Government This link opens in a new window
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1751-present
Government reports, laws, legislative histories, ebooks and selected scholarly articles related to branches of the United States armed forces.
Research government administration of the armed forces along with issues confronting the military on and off the battlefield with access to primary source documents including committee prints, government reports, congressional hearings, legislative hearings, etc. The database also includes books, serials, periodicals and scholarly articles.
Native American Archives This link opens in a new window
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1792-1940
Treaties and correspondence between the US government and American Indian tribes; also photos, census rolls, Dawes packets and enrollment cards.
North American Indian Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window
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1784-2006
Biographies, oral histories, personal papers, images and audio files documenting the history of American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Canadian First Peoples with representation of historical events as told by the individuals who lived through them.
Territorial Papers of the United States This link opens in a new window
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1764-1953
Archival records of each territory of the United States before statehood. Includes Native American negotiations and treaties, correspondence with federal agencies, military records, judicial proceedings, population details, financial statistics, land records, and more.
Official documents include correspondence between territorial officials and federal agencies, details of tribal treaties, accounts of battles and troop movements, petitions for statehood, and records of agricultural and industrial production. Collections also contain firsthand accounts of frontier life via letters and financial documents.
War Department and Indian Affairs This link opens in a new window
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1800-1824
Handwritten correspondence from Indian superintendents and agents, factors of trading posts, Territorial and State governors, and others.
Americana This link opens in a new window
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1493-1975
Search all American history archival collections from Adam Matthew Publishers.
Combined search of American History, American Indian Histories and Cultures, American West, Everyday Life & Women in America c.1800-1920, Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975, Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice, and Virginia Company Archives.
Readex AllSearch This link opens in a new window
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1639-1922
Combined search of American historical newspapers (1690-1922), printed books (1639-1819), and pamphlets and ephemera (1749-1922).
Search all collections of historical primary sources from Readex simultaneously: America's Historical Newspapers, American Broadsides and Ephemera; American Pamphlets; Early American Imprints (Evans and Shaw-Shoemaker).
Sabin Americana: History of the Americas This link opens in a new window
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Good for: Finding primary source materials on exploration, trade, colonialism, slavery and abolition, the western movement, Native Americans, military actions and more.
Contains: Historical books, pamphlets, serials and other documents about North America, South America, Central America and the Caribbean.
Dates covered: 1500-1926

Meriam Report on Indian Administration and the Survey of Conditions of the Indians in the U.S.
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American Indian Movement and Native American Radicalism
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The Indian Trade in the Southeastern Spanish Borderlands: Papers of Panton, Leslie and Company
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UNLV Libraries Special Collections and Archives

Brown (Dora Lee) Papers
The Dora Lee Brown Papers (1904-1950) contain correspondence, notes, certificates of awards, report cards, birth announcements, wedding announcements, a sample ballot from 1936, and copies of photographs. The Brown family were American Indians who lived in Pahrump and Las Vegas, Nevada.
Fort Mojave Indian School records
Collection has been digitized; access it through the links in the collection guide.
Katherine A. Spilde Papers on Native American Gaming
The Katherine A. Spilde Papers on Native American Gaming include materials collected by anthropologist Katherine Spilde about Native American gaming and the greater gaming industry.
Las Vegas Paiute Tribal Archives
Includes government documents from such agencies as the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Most of the documents concern the Las Vegas Indian Colony, which was made up of Paiute and Chemehuevi Indians. Also includes material on the Moapa River (Paiute) Reservation. Some of the documents are from other groups such as the Citizens' Committee for Community Improvement of Las Vegas, Nev. Also includes transcriptions of oral history interviews conducted in the 1970s with Maureen Frank, Daisy Mike, Nellie Sanchez, Herbert Myers, Juanita Lee, and Lee Castillo.
Quinn (Kathy) Papers on the Paiute Indians
The Kathy Quinn Papers on the Paiute Indians (1969-1971) consists of photograph negatives, a kinship chart, an audio tape of Paiute vocabulary, family history, a paper listing Paiute words and their meanings. Also included are the uses of various herbs and plants and a brief autobiography of Stella Smith of the Las Vegas Indian Village.
Stewart - Knack Collection on Nevada Indians
The Omer C. Stewart and Martha C. Knack Collection on the Pyramid Lake Northern Paiute People and Reservation contains materials from 1831 to 1975 collected for Stewart's and Knack's book, As Long as the River Shall Run: An Ethnohistory of Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation. Materials include legal documents, correspondence, newspaper articles, maps, and ethnohistorical data.
Maryellen Vallier Sadovich Papers
Papers include transcripts and handwritten and photocopied documents pertaining to early Nevada history from 1852 to 1934. Documents include information about the boundaries of Nevada; mail service contracts between Utah and California; documents from the Department of the Interior, Office ofIndian Affairs concerning reservations in Southern Nevada; a copy of Gibb's Phonetic alphabet of Southern Nevada Native American languages; maps of tributaries in Southern Nevada; notes about the National Archives photographic holdings of Nevada; and documents from mining reports.

Microfilmed collections

American history and culture: research studies by the National Park Service, 1935-1984.
American Indian oral history collection
The papers of John Peabody Harrington in the Smithsonian Institution, 1907-1957. Southern California Basin
The papers of the Society of American Indians.
All collections about Native Americans on microfilm
Research collections including government agency records, reports of exploration, missionary journals, and anthropological works.

Online digital collections

Documents related to Indian affairs.
United States government records that document debate and decisions related to Native American affairs. The collection currently includes Documents Relating to the Negotiation of Ratified and Unratified Treaties With Various Indian Tribes, 1801-1869 and the Office of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1826-1932.
Photos from Nevada Inter-Tribal Council Collection
Las Vegas Paiute Tribe Online Portal: History
Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian
After Columbus: Four Hundred Years of Native-American Portraits
Denver Public Library collection of photos of Indians of North America
Western History - University of Oklahoma
BIA Central Map FIle, 1800-1960
40 digitized maps of tribal lands and reservations scanned by the National Archives.

History: Primary Sources by Era or Topic

Bibliography

Nevada newspapers

Schools

Native American history primary source collections

UNLV Libraries Special Collections and Archives

Microfilmed collections

Online digital collections

Locations

Contact