The Marquette University Libraries’ Department of Special Collections and University Archives has recently completed two online projects relating to its Native American archival collections, which include extensive materials on Native peoples, some of which, are written (or sung) in indigenous languages.

Descriptive inventories for the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions (BCIM) records have been mounted on the Marquette University Libraries’ Web site. The records, dating from 1839, document Catholic relationships with Native Americans, including missions. The collection contains over 501 cubic feet of documents, 25,000 photographic prints, and 419 reels of microfilm. Over 22,000 correspondents are found in the collection, including Native Americans, high-ranking church and government leaders, and missionaries and their supporters, from Europe, the Caribbean, and Canada as well as the United States. Notable documentation is included for Native peoples in Alaska, Arizona, California, Idaho, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. The Native languages used include Chinook, Choctaw, Dakota and Lakota (Sioux), Innuit (Eskimo), Mohawk, Navajo, Nez Perce, Ojibwa, Snohomish, and several others found in Series 1-1 (General Correspondence), 8-1 and 8-2 (American Indian Language Texts and Recordings), and Series 14-1 (General Publications). Marquette received the BCIM Collection in 1977 in large part because of the advocacy of Rev. Francis Paul Prucha, S.J., Emeritus Professor of History, who used the records in the Bureau’s Washington, D.C. headquarters while conducting research for his 1979 book, The Churches and the Indian Schools, 1888-1912.

Also available are 12 classroom-tested K-12 curricula units for social studies with a strong focus on social studies, U.S., world, and state history (14 states represented), as well as music, art, and language arts (Navajo included). The materials were developed as part of the department’s 2000 NEH-funded summer institute, "America’s First Nations: American Indians in Social Studies Curricula”, a $143,000 NEH project co-directed by Archivist Mark Thiel.

The new online inventories will better enable researchers to plan on-site visits and borrow materials via interlibrary loan. The BCIM project is part of the department’s on-going effort to put all of its collection inventories online. To follow later will be descriptive narratives to augment the inventories.