American Indian Histories and Cultures Adam Matthew Digital (review)

HOW MANY OF US HAVE SAID, “Boy, I wish that was around when I was a student.” Think laptop instead of typewriter, compendium instead of scattered articles, Wikipedia instead of card catalog. I’m feeling some of that browsing through the recently released Adam Matthew database American Indian Histories and Cultures, which is best understood as a digital archive with a variety of finding aids, including hyperlinked indices and thesauri, special online collections and exhibits, detailed downloadable records, and cross-searching functionality. The content is rich, comprising a range of manuscripts curated by the Newberry Library. In this review I’ll describe the scope of the content, system design, and functionality, and the potential usefulness and key features for scholars and students of American Indian and Indigenous thought, history, and culture.

The collection comprises primary and secondary sources ranging from the early sixteenth to the twentieth century, mostly pertaining to European–Indigenous contact through colonial settlement into the contemporary modern era in North America. A majority of the material is sourced from the Edward E. Ayer collection at the Newberry Library, including artwork, photographs, journals, travel narratives, maps and atlases, speeches, petitions, correspondence, and twentieth-century newspapers. Expertly digitized, the material is searchable by keyword, or by document title, author, tribe, or culture area (e.g., Great Plains). While the search function is helpful, this collection is really best experienced through browsing.

The separate collections of documents, maps, and visual resources have their own browsing and filtering features based on the description within the archival record. There are also finding aids organized around thematic areas such as “American Indians and European Powers” and “Military Encounters: Conflicts, Rebellions, and Alliances.” I used the browse by tribe/nation feature in the documents collection to find forty-six documents about my own tribe, the Yaqui tribe, including entire travel journals from early colonial encounters as well as line-item mentions of the work of a Yaqui poet in a 1980s edition of Akwesasne Notes, the influential Mohawk tribal newspaper. Each document is also organized into thematic areas; so, for example, records of military encounters between Mexican authorities and Yaqui leaders are also findable in the broader “Military Encounters” thematic area collection. These are digitized documents: the colors are rich, texts include fonts and scripts of the era, and maps and artwork bear the texture of historical documents that inspire scholars to recall the passage of time.

In terms of usability, there are a range of features to assist researchers, including a number of finding aids such as indices to tribal names, place names, and authors, links to popular searches, and special collections of essays by renowned scholars, biographies, and featured art. Visually compelling finding aids include popular searches arranged by word cloud (the phrase “John C. Adams” is quite large) and an interactive color-coded chronology (a lo-fi version is available for interoperability with software for the visually impaired). Documents are downloadable in three ways: through bibliographic managers EndNote and Refworks, as PDF documents, or to an internal MyArchive or MyLightbox account. The systems designers crafted the interface to function with Blackboard for those instructors interested in applying the tool in online learning environments.

I anticipate that Native American and Indigenous studies scholars and students, tribal college students, scholars of U.S. Native law and policy, and archivists and curators of tribal collections will find American Indian Histories and Cultures most useful. To me it feels a bit like having a shortcut to a Newberry Library special collection directly through my desktop PC. Comparatively, within the field of Native American and Indigenous studies, it’s a sophisticated complement to existing databases Ethnic NewsWatch, eHRAF, and America: History and Life.

Of note, you know how you would exercise caution in allowing your teen-aged son to zoom of in your brand-new BMW? (Does any of us HAVE a brand-new BMW? Post-tenure gift? Wild Horse Pass Casino win? In our wildest settler-state reparations dreams?) OK, well, this tool...