What are Indian depredation claims?
In an effort to maintain peace between American Indian tribes and frontier settlers, Congress established a process in 1796 by which U.S. citizens or inhabitants could obtain compensation from the federal governmen...
In 1902, on the Crow Reservation in south central Montana, the former U.S. Army Scout Curley, who was one of the few eyewitnesses to “Custer’s Last Stand,” was 51 years old, living with his 53 year old wife Takes a Shield, whom he...
By Rose Buchanan, Archivist and Subject Matter Expert for Native American Related Records
The Guion Miller Roll and related applications are useful sources for tracing Eastern Cherokee ancestry. But what does it mean when your ancestor’s Guion ...
By Rose Buchanan, Archivist and Subject Matter Expert for Native American Related Records
What are BIA probate case files?
Since 1910, the BIA has been involved in probating Native American estates in which the deceased person had federal trust asset...
For over 70 years a mainstay form found in non-reservation student case files is an application, typically the 5-192 in its many iterations but on occasion another specialized form. Today’s blog will dive into these and explore what informatio...
From the opening of the first non-reservation boarding school in 1879 (one of the several types of schools described in this previous blog entry) through at least 1907, the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) expected agents and superintendents to collect...
By Rose Buchanan, Archivist and Subject Matter Expert for Native American Related Records
As the National Archives continues to digitize our microfilm collection, more records related to Native Americans are becoming available online in the National...
By Rose Buchanan, Archivist and Subject Matter Expert for Native American Related Records
As the National Archives continues to digitize our microfilm collection, more records related to Native Americans are becoming available online in the National...
(Authors note: the following post discusses, in part, death related records of individuals along with examples.)Nearly 99 years ago, on October 10, 1922, Hairy Moccasin, a farmer on the Crow Reservation and one the then last living Custer scouts, pas...
The National Archives continues to digitize and make available online previously microfilmed collections. In the last few months this has included several collections of superintendency records, dating back to the early 19th century. The first three ...
When Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) schools are discussed, often the infamous off-reservation boarding schools, such as the Carlisle Institute, are typically the first to come to mind. However, the BIA ran several different types of schools, so hopef...
The National Archives continues to digitize and make available online previously microfilmed collections. One of the most recent collections to go live, the Office of Indian Affairs Superintendents' Annual Narrative and Statistical Reports, is a rich...
Today, we are pleased to announce that the National Archives launched a new web-based finding aid featuring digitized historical photographs from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) records in Record Group 75. For the first time, you can explore digit...
Treaties ExplorerHundreds of Native American treaties have been scanned and are freely available online, for the first time, through the National Archives Catalog. Also, in partnership with The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC), these treaties...
Native American Activism on the airwaves with the Seeing Red Radio Archiveby Julie FiveashThe Archives at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, NM is home to the “Seeing Red Radio Archive,” a collection of 89, 1/4̶...
Early photographs are rare enough for most families, even more so for those living on reservations and allotted tribal lands across the west. This makes the Bureau of Indian Affairs Industrial Surveys, taken nationwide to document family's living and...
87 years ago this month President Roosevelt issued an executive order kicking off the then just passed Emergency Conservation Work Act. The rest, as they say, is history as research into ECW and CCC programs, projects, and enrollees continues today b...
The National Archives has embarked on a project to digitize microfilm series and get them into our online Catalog, where researchers can browse, bounce around, or zero in on particular sections throughout hundreds of microfilm rolls in the comfort o...
The National Archives has digitized thousands of documents, images, and movies related to Native American history and culture. This is the fifth in a series of blogs highlighting the records available online through the National Archives catalo...
After reading the Prologue article about Winema Riddell, a Modoc woman who acted as a mediator for the US government, I used the Innovation Hub to make her pension available on the National Archives Catalog. While we don’t know how many pension...
The National Archives has digitized thousands of documents, images, and movies related to Native American history and culture. This is the fourth in a series of blogs highlighting the records available online through the National Archives catal...
Definitions of Indian and Indian TribeIndian Reorganization Act of 1934 allowed people of Indian descent who were not members of federally recognized tribes to apply for recognition as an Indian. The IRA also allowed tribes to set up their own ...
A generation ago the BIA used to tell people to get in touch with the National Archives and give them the name and tribe and birthdate of an individual and we would look the name up on the Indian Census Rolls. We don’t do that anymore; we don&#...
The National Archives has digitized thousands of documents, images, and movies related to Native American history and culture. This is the third in a series of blogs highlighting the records available online through the National Archives catalo...
California Enrollments - backgroundIn 1928 Congress permitted California Indians to bring suit against the US for lands taken from them. They were defined as Indians residing in the State of California on June 1, 1852, and their descendan...
