Indigenous Digital Archive

The Indigenous Digital Archive

A National Leadership Grant project of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture 

The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, in collaboration with the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center and the State Library Tribal Libraries Program, is creating a free online resource of interest to students, families, researchers, and communities. The Indigenous Digital Archive (IDA) is funded by a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the New Mexico Historical Records Advisory Board, and the Knight Foundation. For full details, please read on under the photos, and to learn more as the project progresses, join our mailing list here

In the video available here, Michaela Shirley (Diné), Program Specialist at the University of New Mexico’s Indigenous Design and Planning Institute and part of the advisory panel of the Indigenous Digital Archive and Anna Naruta-Moya, Project Director of the Indigenous Digital Archive, an IMLS National Leadership Grant project of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, introduce the project and walk you through the Indigenous digital archive, a new method of online access to historical documents, that is aimed at creating effective access to large quantities of public records of government boarding schools in New Mexico into the 1930s, and records of the Pueblo Lands Board. This video was recorded at the 2017 ATALM annual conference held in Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico, on October 10-13, 2017. See the video here.

This free resource opens online on Indigenous People's Day, October 9 2017.

Check out press coverage on the IDA Project here:

 

Starting Fall 2017, the IDA makes available in an easily accessible format documents relating to individual, family, and community history, such as:

  • Annual Reports of the Superintendent of Santa Fe Indian Industrial School, 1910 - 1935 (While all school records includes lists of students by names and dates, the student files are located at the National Archives in Denver)
  • Records of the Santa Fe Indian Industrial Indian School, 1890 - 1918 (administrative records and correspondence, mainly of the superintendent)
  • Annual Reports of the Superintendent of Albuquerque Indian School, 1910 - 1935
  • Annual Reports of the Superintendent of Hopi Agency, 1910 - 1923
  • Annual Reports of the Charles H. Burke School [Diné], 1926 - 1935
  • Reports of the Inspections of Indian Schools and Field Offices of the Office of Indian Affairs, 1873 - 1900
  • Records of the New Mexico Superintendency of Indian Affairs, 1849 - 1880
  • Records of the Pueblo Lands Board, 1924

The IDA interface will make it easy to find documents of interest. Other features enable users to:

  • Add information about people, places, or events
  • Create a collection of documents of interest to you, and even add documents or photos to share
  • Offer counter-narratives to specific information found in the documents, in order to show a more accurate history
  • Redact portions of a document if sensitive information appears within it
  • Contribute information that is private or that you share - you can work on documents individually or collaboratively with other researchers or a class
  • Share findings with parents and grandparents to spark recollections of additional family and community history

More about the project:

  email: info@native-docs.org     /     website: www.native-docs.org       /       facebook: IndigenousDigitalArchive