LibGuides: U.S. History: American Indian History

Online Primary Sources

Indigenous Histories and Cultures in North America This link opens in a new window
This database contains manuscripts, artwork, and rare printed books dating from the earliest contact with European settlers right up to photographs and newspapers from the mid-twentieth century. It includes a wide range of rare and original documents from treaties, speeches and diaries, to historic maps and travel journals.
American Indians and the American West This link opens in a new window
Historical documents and other primary sources focusing on American Indians. Collections include Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Records from the Major Council Meetings of American Indian Tribes.
North American Indian Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window
Autobiographies, biographies, Indian publications, oral histories, personal writings, photographs, drawings, and audio files mainly from the 1700-1800s.
North American Indian Drama This link opens in a new window
Full-text plays representing the stories and creative energies of American Indian and First Nation (Canadian) playwrights of the 1900s.
Indigenous Peoples of North America (Part One) This link opens in a new window
Historical documents and other primary sources including newspapers, manuscripts, drawings and sketches, photographs, maps, periodicals, monographs, reports, legal materials, organizational records, and population census records from the 1500s well into the 1900s. Covers the history of Indigenous peoples in the U.S. and Canada.

American Indian Records in the National Archives
Information relating to American Indians from as early as 1774 through the mid 1990s.
National Museum of the American Indian Online Collections
High-quality images of cultural objects held by the museum.
Utah American Indian Digital Archives
Resources regarding Utah’s Indian tribes including articles, books, government documents, tribal documents, oral histories, photographs, and maps pertaining to the Northwestern Shoshone, Goshute, Paiute, Utah Navajo, White Mesa, and Ute Indians.
Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center
Digitized resources relating to the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the flagship Indian boarding school in the United States from 1879 through 1918.

Historical Newspapers

Indigenous Newspapers in North America (1828-2016) This link opens in a new window
Historical newspapers from Indigenous peoples of the U.S. and Canada from 1828-2016. Includes bi-lingual and Indigenous-language editions, such as Hawaiian, Cherokee, and Navajo languages.

Native American Newspapers at the Library of Congress
Digitized issues of Native American newspapers housed at the Library of Congress.
The Indian Sentinal (Newspaper) 1902 -1962
The Indian Sentinel featured articles about Native Americans across the United States and their evangelization by the Catholic Church. Most were first-hand accounts by lifelong missionaries in the field that were often illustrated with photographs they had taken. Also featured are articles, essays, and letters by Native Americans, many of whom were students in Catholic schools.

History of the Tongva People

O, My Ancestor by Claudia K. Jurmain; William McCawley
Call Number: Available at LAPL
ISBN: 9781597141154
Publication Date: 2009-10-01
In O, My Ancestor, members of the Los Angeles area's Gabrielino-Tongva community reflect on what it means to be Gabrielino-Tongva today, when centuries of domination by the Spanish and then Americans have left little of the native culture intact. This book gives voice to the Tongva community's leaders, activists, educators, and artists and is part of an ongoing reclamation of their heritage.

Essays by historian William McCawley interspersed throughout the book introduce Tongva history and traditional culture, providing context for the issues the community now grapples with. Faced with the challenge of reconstructing forgotten cultural practices in one of the largest metropolises in the world, the Tongva inspire fascinating questions of identity, culture, sovereignty, and the impact of the past on life today.

LA’s Tongva descendants: ‘We originated here’
The radio station KCRW's show Curious Coast talks with Julia Bogany, a Tongva tribal elder.
TONGVA LAND FOREVER: The True First Citizens of Los Angeles
Three Tongva women talk about the community and issues facing them today.
Tribal History from the Gabrielino-Tongva Indian Tribe
A brief timeline and history of the tribe.
TRHT-LA: Tongva History Walk (YouTube Video)
Presented in collaboration with local Tongva leaders Cindi Alvitre, Julia Bogany, Desiree Martinez, and Craig Torres, the Tongva History Walk attempted to re-envision the landscape of Downtown Los Angeles as Yaanga—the village where Tongva and Gabrieleno communities lived prior to contact with European settlers and missionaries in the late 1700s. Throughout the program, participants got a glimpse into indigenous worldviews that highlight our current relationships with water and nature, public spaces, oral histories, land, and ancestry. As the Tongva leaders fought through a cacophony of traffic and city noises in order to guide us through the Yaanga Plaque, Placita Olvera, Union Station, and other unacknowledged sites, we were poignantly reminded of the indigenous communities who are constantly struggling to be seen and heard.
KCET: Genocide, Slavery, and L.A.'s Role in the Decimation of Native Californians
Overcoming Hindrances to Our Enduring Responsibility to the Ancestors: Protecting Traditional Cultural Places by Desireé Reneé Martinez
Mapping the Tongva Villages of L.A.'s Past
An interactive map by The Los Angeles Times.
Mapping Indigenous LA
Uncovering multiple layers of indigenous Los Angeles through digital storytelling & oral history with community leaders, youth and elders from indigenous communities throughout the city.

Selected AI Menoirs in the Library

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
ISBN: 9781571313560
Publication Date: 2015
GENRE: Non-fiction; Nature Writing; Nature Essays
PAGES: 410
DESCRIPTION: As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" (Elizabeth Gilbert). Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings--asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass--offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices.
Blonde Indian by Ernestine Hayes
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780816532360
Publication Date: 2015-05-15
Drawing on the special relationship that the Native people of southeastern Alaska have always had with nature, Blonde Indian is a story about returning. Told in eloquent layers that blend Native stories and metaphor with social and spiritual journeys, this enchanting memoir traces the author's life from her difficult childhood growing up in the Tlingit community, through her adulthood, during which she lived for some time in Seattle and San Francisco, and eventually to her return home. Neither fully Native American nor Euro-American, Hayes encounters a unique sense of alienation from both her Native community and the dominant culture.
Bad Indians by Deborah A. Miranda
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9781597142335
Publication Date: 2013
"In this beautiful and devastating book, part tribal history, part lyric and intimate memoir, Deborah Miranda tells both the stories of her Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen family and the experience of California Indians as a whole through oral histories, newspaper clippings, anthropological recordings, personal reflections, and poems. Reassembling the shards of her people's past, she creates a work of literary art that is wise, angry, and playful all at once, one that will break your heart and teach you to see the world anew"--Back cover.
The tao of raven: an Alaska native memoir by Ernestine Hayes
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780295745725
Publication Date: 2017
Using motifs from the story Raven and the Box of Daylight to deepen her narration and reflection, Hayes expresses an ongoing frustration and anger at the obstacles and prejudices still facing Alaska Natives in their own land, but also recounts her own story of attending and completing college in her fifties and becoming a professor and a writer.

University Library

U.S. History

Online Primary Sources

Historical Newspapers

History of the Tongva People

Selected AI Menoirs in the Library