Indigenous Studies

Consists of phonotapes of approximately fifty-five hours duration made primarily at San Juan Pueblo, New Mexico, by anthropologist Alfonso Ortiz to help preserve the language and the culture, and to perpetuate the oral tradition, of the Tewa-speaking Pueblo.

Virginia Card is a Native American of Delaware and Creek descent. Consists of correspondence, writings, subject files, photographs, and audio-visual material. The collection is especially noteworthy for Virginia Card's extensive documentation of the activities of Native American communities in California.

The Records of the Association on American Indian Affairs document the corporate life of an influential and resilient player in the history of twentieth-century Native American advocacy. From its formation by non-Indians in New York in 1922 to its re-establishment in South Dakota in 1995 under a wholly Indian administration, the AAIA has defended the rights and promoted the welfare of Native Americans and, in this process, has shaped the views of their fellow citizens. The AAIA has waged innumerable battles over the years, touching on the material and spiritual well-being of Indians in every state of the Union: from the right of Native Americans to control their resources to their right to worship freely; from their right to federal trusteeship to their right to self-determination. The evolving nature of this struggle, in terms of conception and execution; the environment in which it was waged, both within and without the AAIA; the parade of men and women who figured in it; and the relationships among them can all be found in the abundant and insightful records which constitute these Records. The correspondence, minutes, reports, articles, clippings, and other documents in the collection, augmented by photographic and audiovisual material, represent a window not only on the AAIA but on the entities and personalities with which it interacted. While its vision has co-existed with others, and while it has been far from alone in its contribution to Indian life, no consideration of twentieth-century Native American affairs can disregard its arduous and, for the most part, fruitful work.

William Byler was Executive Director of the Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA) from 1962 to 1980. After leaving AAIA, Byler continued advocating for the Native American community, first at Gerard, Byler and Associates and later at William Byler Associates. Byler's papers document his work on behalf of the Native American community after leaving AAIA. The papers include legal memoranda, draft and final agreements between Native American communities and companies or government agencies, and court documents, as well as topical files of related legislation and reports on the issues.

Consists of a small group of papers of J. Paul Baldeagle (Princeton University Class of 1923), a South Dakota-born Sioux, who was a schoolteacher for 35 years at William MacFarland High School in Bordentown, New Jersey, as well as a Native American rights activist.

Fergus M. Bordewich is a journalist and author of the books Bound for Canaan, Killing the White Man's Indian, My Mother's Ghost, and Cathay: A Journey in Search of Old China. As a journalist, he has traveled throughout Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, writing about human rights and other issues for The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Readers Digest, and other periodicals. The Bordewich tapes are recordings of Community Council meetings and other meetings related to Native American affairs, most of which took place in 1959.

Thomas Adams (1830-1900) was a civil engineer, topographer, and surveyor who traveled west with Isaac Stevens (1818-1862), the newly-appointed governor of the Washington Territory. From 1853 to 1859, Adams served the party as meteorologist, topographer, sketch artist, and eventually, as assistant to Lieutenant John Mullan (1830-1909), who was in charge of the surveying. This collection consists of four journals and one letter book documenting Adams's life from 1852 to 1859. In addition to detailed descriptions of Adams's experiences, the journals also contain expertly drawn sketches of landscapes and forts, Native Americans, and animals, as well as home-made dictionaries of the Flathead language.

Consists of a journal containing daily notations and copies of correspondence between Reynolds and his military superiors and the U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs during an emigration expedition (1837) of Creek Indians.

The collection consists of documents, correspondence, photographs, and other papers of William Courtenay (1832-1901), an English settler, veteran of the American Civil War, and frontier businessman who held positions in the United States Department of the Interior as postmaster, clerk, and Indian Agent at Fort Berthold, Dakota Territory, from 1874 to 1882. These materials document conditions at the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation and are of particular interest for their documentation of frontier transactions, corruption and mismanagement within the reservation system, and the relationships between the people of the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara), the Sioux people, and white settlers.

Consists of two manuscripts by David Starr Hoyt, an officer in the Mexican War: an overland account in route to the California gold rush fields (1852) and an account of Native Americans drawn from Hoyt's experiences as a member of Isaac Stevens's exploring expedition surveying a route for the Northern Pacific Railroad from Oregon to Wisconsin in 1853.

Consists of photographs taken by American photographer Owen Luck, which are arranged according to three separate series: Wounded Knee 1973, Menominee 1975, and Pine Ridge Reservation life 2000-2001.

Consists of a scrapbook entitled "Annual Report of the Girls' Advisors of Haskell Institute, 1935-1936."

This collection consists of materials collected by the law firm of McCarter & English of Newark, New Jersey in connection with representation of the Iowa, Sac and Fox, Otoe and Missouria, and Omaha tribes before the United States Indian Claims Commission between 1958 and 1970. The records document the cases; briefs, findings of fact, valuations, reports and orders are included. More significantly, the records include a vast storehouse of evidentiary documentation on the history of these tribes and others, much of it dating to the early nineteenth century.

Consists of a closed collection of more than 5,000 Western Americana photographs, consisting mostly of documentary photographs of the Trans-Mississippi West from the late 1860s to early 1900s. Subjects include American Indians (especially studio portraits), natural wonders, cities, towns, buildings, and economic activities (mining, railroads, logging, and agriculture). Some photographs relate to the Indigenous populations of Mexico and Central America. The dimensions, physical formats, and photographic processes of the photographs vary widely.

Consists of two disbound photograph albums containing 1,025 mounted albumen photographs of North American Indians, including portraits of delegates to Washington, D.C.; expedition photographs; and early Western studio portraits by American photographers. Most of the photographs in the albums are described in William Henry Jackson's Descriptive Catalogue of the Photographs of North American Indians (1877). This collection is included in the Princeton University Digital Library.

Consists of 170 albumen prints of Native Americans and frontiersmen taken by Julian Scott in 1890 for the 11th United States Census with a No. 2 Kodak camera, with accompanying documentation.

Consists of twenty-two photographs of a delegation of Yankton Sioux Indians that visited Washington, D.C., in 1904, taken by Thomas William Smillie for the Smithsonian's Department of Preparation's Section of Photography.

Sheldon Jackson was a Presbyterian missionary in the Western United States in the 19th century. This collection consists of three portfolios with 576 photographic prints and 5 photomechanical photogravures of Native Americans and related subjects compiled by Jackson, possibly from negatives in the collections of the Bureau of American Ethnology and by ordering prints from various photographic trade catalogs.

Consists of a large bound volume of nine black-and-white photographs by American West photographer Ben Wittick, probably taken between 1880 and 1903.

This is an open collection of photographs by Norwegian-born photographer, essayist, and lecturer Frederick I. Monsen (1865-1929). Photographs primarily depict Hopi and Navajo people, structures, and landscapes in New Mexico and Arizona.

Contact sheets, negatives, prints, notebooks, research files, manuscripts, and correspondence of Ulli Steltzer, a German-born photographer residing in the United States and Canada since 1953. Materials relate to a number of published and unpublished photography projects spanning Steltzer's career from 1957 until 2008, including her portraits of prominent Princeton intellectuals and her wide-ranging documentary work, featuring American Indian artists of the Pacific Northwest, black communities in the American South, social conditions for migrant laborers and immigrants throughout the United States, and many other rural and tribal communities throughout the Americas and Asia.

Consists of copies of court documents, correspondence, and clippings of Hank Adams, an Assinboine-Sioux Indian, who worked for the National Indian Youth Council and the National Congress of American Indians, and as national director (1968- ) of the Survival of American Indians Association (SAIA).

Taos Pueblo lost thousands of acres of land as well as Taos Lake, a sacred Pueblo shrine, when Carson National Forest was created in 1906. After a sixty-four year fight, the government returned the land to the Pueblo. This collection brings together four discrete collections: the papers of Barbara Greene Kilberg, a White House Presidential Fellow at the time of the dispute; the papers of Corinne Locker, secretary to Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA) president Oliver LaFarge (1901-1963) and later AAIA Southwest Field Secretary; the papers of Rufus G. Poole, regional attorney for the AAIA in New Mexico, and the papers of William G. Schaab, an Albuquerque attorney who became involved in the fight in 1967.

Consists of twenty ethnographic albumen prints of North American Indians, commissioned by Prince Roland Bonaparte and photographed by Alfred Ayotte, plus two additional photographs of Bonaparte.

Marc Gaede (1946- ) is an American photographer, environmental activist, and teacher based in California. The collection consists of Gaede's black-and-white photographs of the American West and Southwest, correspondence, contracts, and other working files primarily related to his books on photography, archaeology, and conservation, and a large group of working files, which include audiovisual and digital materials, for a biography project Gaede collaborated on with Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux activist Robert Sundance (1927-1993).

The Garrett-Gates Collection contains approximately 250 Mesoamerican manuscripts, chiefly written in Latin script. Maya languages are well represented, predominantly Yucatec and K'iche', and to a lesser degree Kaqchikel, Tzutuhil, Tzeltal, Pokoman, Chorti, Cholti, and K'eq'chi.

This collection consists primarily of pamphlets, flyers and posters addressing a wide range of issues affecting the indigenous communities of Ecuador, including, but not limited to, agriculture, health, human rights, culture, politics, religions, tourism and women's issues. These materials were published between 1983 and 2001.

This microfilm consists of pamphlet materials relating to the culture, living conditions, and legal rights of the indigenous peoples of Chile.

This collection of Peruvian ephemera contains flyers, pamphlets, and reports, as well as magazines and serials.

This collection contains pamphlets, leaflets, serials, small monographs, and posters pertaining to indigenous peoples and other ethnic minorities in Bolivia.

Consists of 14 negatives (8x10 inches) of the Lacandón Maya by Giles G. Healey made at the same time he discovered the Maya murals at Bonampak while on assignment from The United Fruit Company in 1946, and approximately 1,500 negatives (120 format, 6 centimeters) of the Tzeltal and Lacandón Maya of the Chiapas Highlands taken by Ralph Hilt from approximately 1960 to 1964.

Consists primarily of three diaries that William Dundas Bathurst (1859-1940) kept while serving as an officer of the Association Internationale du Congo (AIC) from December 1883 to September 1886.

Native Americans; Historical Subject Files Collection, AC109, Princeton University Archives

Titles about the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere housed in the Cotsen Children's Library, a special collection of international children's materials.