Indigenous Cultures, Anthropology, and Linguistics

The American Philosophical Society's collection contains material related to the languages, traditions, history, and continuity of over 650 different Indigenous cultures throughout the Americas, with a special emphasis on Native North American peoples.

The ethnographic and linguistic collecting of the Library & Museum can be traced back to the Society’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, who sought to gather word lists of Indigenous languages in order to better understand the cultural relationships and interrelated histories of Native peoples. From this information he also developed federal Indian policies that were devastating to Native societies. The linguist and APS President Peter Stephen Du Ponceau (1760-1844)attempted to expand Jefferson’s data through broader collaboration with explorers, missionaries, academics, and Native language speakers themselves who were passing through Philadelphia. These activities expanded massively in the 20th century when the Society began to actively seek documentation recorded by field linguists and anthropologists who were dependent upon the linguistic, cultural, and historical knowledge of the Indigenous people with whom they worked.

Among the most commonly sought collections are the American Council of Learned Societies linguistic collection, the papers of Franz Boas, and the papers of many of his students (and their students,) such as Mary R. Haas, Frank Speck, and Ella Deloria. The collections also include the papers of historians, anthropological thinkers such as William Shedrick Willis, major historical figures such as Ely S. Parker, and oral histories from contemporary Indigenous people.

While manuscripts make up most of the material, the collections also contain over 130,000 photographs and other images, and over 3,500 hours of audio recordings, the latter of which are nearly all digitized and available through the APS Digital Library. The Library & Museum continues to collect widely in these areas and currently houses material dating from 1553 to 2019, relating to over 650 Indigenous cultures of the Americas.

A few of the major collections are highlighted below.

Center for Native American and Indigenous Research

Indigenous Subject Guide

Mary R. Haas Papers

Haas Papers Finding Aid

The Mary R. Haas Papers contain rich, extensive documentation of more than 90 different indigenous languages of the Americas, more languages than are found in the papers of any other person in the APS Library. Over a lengthy career, Mary R. Haas (1910–1996) became a leading figure in documentary, historical, and comparative linguistics, developing a reputation for precision and rigor. A student of Edward Sapir, her first fieldwork was with Ditidaht speakers in Vancouver Island in 1931, followed in the mid- to late-1930s by fieldwork in Oklahoma and the Southeast. During these years she recorded several thousand pages of stories, songs, and grammatical material in a dozen Native languages, including Creek, Natchez, and Tunica, often working with people now considered to be the last fluent speakers of some of these languages. Her notebooks are now being used by Native communities and linguists to build and strengthen new generations of speakers.

After World War II, Haas began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley and served as the first director (1953–1975) of the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages. Over these decades, in her student Karl Teeter’s words, "she trained more Americanist linguists than did [Franz] Boas and [Edward] Sapir put together.”

Frank Speck Papers

Speck Collection Finding Aid

Frank Gouldsmith Speck (1881–1950) was one of the most prolific ethnographers of the early 20th century, focusing especially on Algonquian and Iroquoian-speaking peoples from the Carolinas to northern Quebec, Oklahoma to Ontario. Although he was chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania from 1913 to 1949, he was known to strongly prefer being out in the field. As one of Franz Boas’s earliest graduate students, he developed an interest in comparing the details of these neighboring cultures to determine how different practices and innovations were adopted and adapted to local needs over time. His manuscripts and extensive photographs from his travels are noteworthy for their focus on the practical particulars of everyday life that make up a culture, such as hunting, trapping, ceremonies, games, clothing, traditional crafts, and many other topics.

The cultures most prominent in Speck’s papers include the Catawba, Cherokee, Creek, Delaware, Houma, "Iroquois" (Haudenosaunee), Labrador "Eskimo" (Inuit), Mohegan, "Montagnais-Naskapi" (Ilnu/Innu), Nanticoke, Penobscot, Powhatan, Tunica, and Yuchi. In addition to his manuscript and extensive photograph collection, he also produced numerous hand-annotated maps in which he theorized on the traditional hunting territories of many of the cultures he studied.

Franz Boas Collections

Boas Papers Finding Aid

From the 1880s to the 1940s, Franz Boas (1858–1942) helped to define academic anthropology in the United States. His first fieldwork was among the Inuit of Baffin Island in 1883. Through his subsequent focus on the cultures of the Northwest Coast, Boas became a central figure in American anthropology by the first decade of the 20th century, arguing against the dominant 19th-century theories of cultural evolution. As Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, Boas trained a generation of students in linguistics and anthropology in methods still central to those fields to this day. He was also a leading public intellectual, known as an outspoken opponent of scientific racism, anti-Semitism, and fascism.

The APS holds six collections related to Franz Boas. The largest of these, The Franz Boas Papers, has been fully digitized and can be viewed online. The majority of Boas’s core fieldwork among many cultures, especially the Kwakwaka’wakw, who he referred to as the “Kwakiutl,” can be found in the American Council of Learned Societies Committee on Native American Languages (or ACLS) collection. This collection also contains foundational linguistic and ethnographic fieldwork relating to over 170 languages by Boas, his contemporaries, and his students.

ACLS Collection Finding Aid

Collection Highlights

Lists of words in Native American languages

Francisco Morán, Detail of title page of “Arte y vocabulario de la lengua Cholti,”

Francisco Morán, detail of title page of “Arte y vocabulario de la lengua Cholti,” Guatemalan Mayan Texts, circa 1675.

Indigenous Cultures, Anthropology, and Linguistics

Mary R. Haas Papers

Frank Speck Papers

Franz Boas Collections

Collection Highlights

Thomas Jefferson, Comparative Vocabularies

Franz Boas, Sketch of Iceberg in Cumberland Sound

Franz Boas, Detail of Upper Chehalis Field Notebooks

Mary R. Haas at Port Renfrew

Frank Speck, Specimen of a Plant Used by the Seminole

Jane Ettawageshik, Ottawa Audio Material

A. Zeno Shindler, Detail of Photograph of Chip-Pin (Ute)

Francisco Morán, Detail of title page of “Arte y vocabulario de la lengua Cholti,”