This is a guest post by Barbara Bair, a historian in the Manuscript Division. She most recently wrote about Ralph Ellison’s photography work. Two important collections of Native American heritage have been digitized and placed on the Library’s website, enabling readers and researchers to dig into histories that are not widely known. The first, …
Author and academic Ned Blackhawk has been studying Native American history for a long time, and he thinks there are reasons to be optimistic about the future. He says that groundwork laid over the past several decades, particularly in the 1970s protest movements, has established a growing recognition of Native American influence on the foundations of U.S. culture and society, resulting in a cultural renaissance. His latest book, “The Rediscovery of America,” won the National Book Award for nonfiction this year, and his panel discussion at the National Book Festival was packed.
Printed in Cambridge between 1660 and 1663, the Eliot Indian Bible today represents a landmark in printing history: It was translated into the Wampanoag language of the region’s Algonquin tribes and was the first Bible printed in North America in any language. In recent decades, the Wampanoag nation has used the Eliot Bible as a tool to help resurrect its ancestral language. The Library preserves a 1685 copy.
President Thomas Jefferson devised two versions of a unique cipher for the Lewis and Clark expedition across the unknown Louisiana Territory so that the explorers could relay sensitive information to him. They were never used, but the Library has preserved both ciphers as curious relics of a bold mission across a wild continent.
The Library and three Native American tribes are collaborating on a project to digitize and restore some 9,000 wax cylinder recordings of Native Americans singing and telling stories from more than a century ago. The work is the subject of "Language is Life," a documentary narrated by Joy Harjo, the former U.S. poet laureate. It premiered at the Library in November in advance of its broadcast as part of the PBS series, “Native America.”
Some of the U.S. military's best intelligence assets during both World Wars were Native American troops who used their own, unwritten languages as the basis for coded radio messages. These Code Talkers, particularly Navajo Marines, were invaluable in the Pacific theater of World War II. Twenty-nine Navajo Code Talkers were later awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Many of these soldiers' personal stories are preserved in the LIbrary's Veterans History Project.
The Library recently acquired a rare surviving copy of the complete run of a Civil War regimental newspaper, the Soldier's Letter of the 2nd Colorado Cavalry of the American military. More than a hundred regiments on both sides of the conflict printed at least one edition of a camp newspaper, but few survive and a complete run of one paper is even harder fo find today. The four-page Soldier's Letter, staunchly against slavery and the Confederacy, ran for 50 editions between 1864 until after the war ended in 1865. Though mostly concerned with the regiment's history and daily details of camp life, the paper shows that soldiers were more concerned about warring Native American tribes than they were Confederate units, and they would eventually form a military bridge between the Civil War and the Indian Wars that followed.
Theft, fraud, harassment, withholding of payment — courts around the world hear these charges all the time. Yet, they’re far from modern. The Library’s newly acquired San Salvador Huejotzingo Codex, for example, documents a legal proceeding from 1571 in which Indigenous Nahuatl officials in central Mexico accused their village’s Spanish administrator of these very same …
The winter counts created by some Native American peoples chronicle centuries of their history in pictures: battles fought, treaties struck, buffalo hunts, meteor showers, droughts, famines, epidemics. The counts — painted mostly on buffalo hides until the species was hunted to nearextinction in the late 19th century — served as a way for tribes of …
