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Test texts available online:
Reports of the
Superintendent of Santa Fe Indian School, 1910-1922
http://is.gd/SFIS1910
Reports of the
Superintendent of Santa Fe Indian School, 1923-1930
http://is.gd/SFIS1923
List of Students
at SFIS, 1919-1929 (Note: some years missing, but may be available
in documents from other series)
http://is.gd/SFISstudents1919
Reports of
the Superintendent of San Juan Day School, 1922-1926
http://is.gd/SanJuanDaySchool1922
From the Superintendent's Report, check out all the sewing output that the little
girls at the government school at the San Juan Reservation (of the BIA's
Northern Navajo Agency) did in the 1922 school year: http://is.gd/SanJuanDaySchoolSewing1922
The Museum of Indian Arts and Cultural (MIAC) is currently applying for IMLS
National Leadership Grant funding to support this collaborative project, the
Indigenous Digital Archive.
We are building an opensource tool to
allow Native American community members and others to individually and
collaboratively engage with authentic public documents of community history,
government actions, and civic life never before available in New
Mexico.
The project will create free online effective access for federal records that
have never before available in New Mexico, documents which have an immediate
and direct relation to Native individual and community histories. These records
date from the 1830s-1930s and are open. The first round of the project will
focus on records related to land and the federal boarding schools and day
schools, 1890s-1930, documents which have a great amount of information about
individual and community histories.
Software tool for creating meaningful access and building on each
other’s learning experiences
These federal records, while individually understandable, are bureaucratically
complex in arrangement, and inherently interwoven among different document
sets. (The same report may discuss a Pueblo of the north and another of the
south, or day schools at Tewa and Dine (aka Navajo) reservations.) This grant
project will create an opensource software tool that will interface with pdfs
of the records, and allow readers to tag parts of the documents with tags
meaningful to them, whether it is the correct spelling of an ancestor’s name,
or a topic they’re researching, such as “boarding school deaths” or “running
away.”
The documents, while sometimes typewritten, are resistant to OCR, or automatic
Optical Character Recognition by computer.
For Native peoples, these records provide information critical to understanding
experiences in periods of complex and new and more involved relations with the
federal government with long-lasting consequences for individuals and
communities.
Creating effective access locally is particularly
important at this time as this is a window of opportunity where the tribes have
the benefit of understanding the records with the input of those who are elders
today who were young children at the time of the creation of the later records,
and others who still have first-hand stories from their parents or grandparents
in the 1920s-1930s and even earlier.
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