Digitized Native American Reservation Photographs

Cara Burnidge

"Indian woman and young girls in front of tents," Dept. of
Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Standing Rock Agency,
September 17, 1947 [285835]

Today, the National Archives's "Spotlight on the Records" highlighted digitized records that may be of interest to readers: Native American Reservation Photographs. 

Most of the photographs are found in Record Group 75: Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1793-1999, but other federal agencies also took part in documenting life on reservations. Daily life is often the focus of the photographs, but this can range from farming and families to sports to protests. The picture included here is one of over 5,000 digitized photographs of Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota. For those interested in connecting the past to the present or including Native Americans as a part of American history well beyond the colonial era,  these photographs are an excellent resource to share with students. 

In addition to the photos of Standing Rock, there are also collections of Spirit Lake Sioux at Fort Trotten (North Dakota), Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate on the Lake Travers Reservation (South Dakota), Oglala Sioux on Pine Ridge Reservation (South Dakota), Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapahoe at Wind River Agency (Wyoming), and areas near Fort Berthold Indian Reservation (North Dakota) affected by flooding during the construction of Garrison Dam.


Deep dives into these archives can be a helpful exercise with students, as Emily Clark has noted in "Taking Class to the Archives." These digitized photographs might be one way to bring the archives to your students. In Emily's class, the archives became an opportunity to do the the work of a historian narrating the past. These photographs certainly can provide a similar opportunity. Another possibility, and one encouraged by NARA, is for students to become Citizen Archivists, tagging digitized photos to identify and describe the subject, objects, and themes. Spending some time in class tagging photos together is another way to have the kind of "Adventures in Materiality" that Sarah Dees had in her Museums course. By tagging together, a class might be able to practice seeing and analyzing the materiality, embodiment, and production of culture in the past but also in the present through the work (or outsourced work) of the National Archives.*

*H/T Adam Park who suggested David Morgan's "Religion and Embodiment in the Study of Material Culture," in ORE Religion in America, 10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013.32 

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The Catholic News Archive

Catherine R. Osborne

While admittedly sometimes the very last thing I want is more sources -- there are so many sources, I lament as I trim redundant quotes out of my current manuscript -- I also can't help but be excited by how many digitization projects are out there. One with incredible potential, I think, is the Catholic News Archive, a project of the Catholic Research Resources Alliance.




The CRRA has been working on preliminaries for this archive since 2011. Some helpful history and background on all their work is here. They've identified a list of diocesan and national Catholic papers as "priority papers" for their own digitizing. Fundraising is ongoing, but they've been able to open a test site for the archive, which is already really useful even though there are only seven titles; one of them is the National Catholic Reporter, and another is the Catholic News Service feeds.

You can browse by date (currently, 1920-1968) or by title. You can also do full-text keyword searches.

As a bonus, the CRRA has been compiling links to other Catholic papers available online elsewhere. There's a cool interactive map:

It's hard for me to overstate my level of excitement about the possibilities here as the archive grows. Individual papers will be a critical resource for those wishing to write specifically on (say) Miami or San Francisco, but an entire collection of representative dioceses and national news sources makes it possible to engage in larger comparative research. I spent an hour this afternoon collecting mentions of "experimentation" for an article I'm developing--work I would have spent a week or two on using microfilm. 

Just thinking about the Vatican II era which the CRRA is currently seeking grants for, a number of potential projects come immediately to mind. Searchable access to these papers would shed significant light on local and national American Catholic responses to the Cold War, to the Vietnam War (including the foundations of the peace movement which played an important role during the 1970s and 1980s), to civil rights, and to increasing immigration from Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, and other countries in the aftermath of the 1965 immigration bill. Diocesan papers, despite their often "official" tone, contain critical information on diocesan and parish activities around these and other issues, while the National Catholic Reporter made these issues its "beat" and provides granular coverage. These papers also contain coverage of important and understudied national stories; for example, the way in which Catholic sisters both transformed and were transformed by the women's movement has yet to be fully explored, and the digitization of local and national papers would provide amazing data. And of course these papers, despite their origin in committed Catholic groups, don't need to serve as a resource only for 'celebratory' scholarship. We could look for topics not covered, including those of critical interest today like homosexuality, birth control, divorce, and, of course, sexual abuse. Digital access to these papers makes these primary sources readily available to scholars of social, economic, political, and other histories as well, opening up opportunities not only with Catholic history but within American (and even global) history as a whole. It will enrich these projects in a way which would be impossible if scholars whose primary area was not religion had to travel to a specialized library in order to use microfilm of rare diocesan newspapers.

Now if only someone can point me to the entire digitized and searchable Catholic Directory....

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