North American Indian Thought and Culture

North American Indian Thought and Culture brings together more than 119,000 pages of personal stories, many of which are previously unpublished, rare, or hard to find. Fifty-four volumes, representing 15,000 pages, are from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alone.  Additional materials bring coverage through the present day. Included are biographies, auto-biographies, personal narratives, speeches, diaries, letters, and oral histories.

Virtually all North American regions are represented with nearly 500 nations represented in all.  The collection presents the entire spectrum of native peoples’ experiences from their own point of view. Firsthand accounts reveal how Indians lived, thought, and fought to protect their interests; how the tribes interacted with each other and the white invaders; and how they reacted to the constantly changing and challenging situations they faced. Twenty prominent Indians have been selected for special emphasis, with multiple biographies presented.

The database includes much more than this list of significant leaders, however. Many of the biographies are about Indians pursuing their everyday lives and reflecting on what was happening to them.  These rare and informative biographies are supported with historical materials that provide context for the personal stories. Also included is a detailed timeline of Indian events, cross-referenced by region and tribe, to further aid in contextual placement.  In addition, the collection includes more than 20,000 photographs and more than 2,000 oral histories, presented in audio and transcript form.

Ways to use the database:

• Table of Contents-- Use these to see what's contained in the database. This is the best way to check whether an author or a source is included.  To use this tool, simply click on the appropriate table of contents button on the navigation bar.
• Find Tools -- The "FIND" tools let you search for specific authors and sources that the database contains and combine criteria to narrow down what you're looking for.  The difference between the "FIND" tools and the "SEARCH" tools (explained next) is in the results they give. The "FIND" tools do not return documents, but rather lists of authors and sources in the database. 
• Search Tools -- The "SEARCH" tools let you analyze words and documents that occur within the text of stories that meet your search criteria. The "SEARCH" tools return stories or bibliographic citations or both.

Boolean Operators in Full-Text Searching:

• The vertical line ( | ) is the OR operator (e.g., avarice|greed or holy ghost|spirit).
• Space: serves as the AND operator in sentence and paragraph Proximity Searching (e.g., church state retrieve all cases where church and state appear in the same specified context; this is not the case in phrase searching).
• These expressions can be combined for more sophisticated searches; for example, searching
  old|aged|ancient m.n|fellow*
  finds any of the three adjectives together with the nouns man or fellow in the singular or plural.

Wildcard Characters in Full-Text Searching:

. (period): matches any single character (e.g., gentlem.n will retrieve gentleman and gentlemen).

* (asterisk): matches any string of characters, anchoring the match at the beginning of a word (e.g., cigar* will match cigar, cigars, cigarette, etc.).

* (asterisk): matches any string of characters, anchoring the match at the end of a word (e.g., *habit will retrieve habit, cohabit, and inhabit), or in the middle (e.g., c.*eers matches compeers, cheers, and careers).

.? (period question mark): matches the characters entered or the characters entered plus one more character in place of the question mark (e.g., hono.?r matches both honor and honour and cat.? matches cat and cats, but not cathedral, Catherine, etc.).

[a-z] (brackets): matches a single character found in the specified range (e.g., [c-f]at will match cat, dat, eat, and fat) or any letters within the brackets (e.g., civili[zs]e will match both civilize and civilise).

# (hash mark): matches capitalized words only (e.g., #bacon will retrieve Bacon, but not bacon). Otherwise word searches are case insensitive. Please note that this operator does not work properly in conjunction with the vertical bar (e.g., searching #hamlet|#bacon will not retrieve accurate results).

E (capital letter): matches all accented and non-accented forms (e.g., to search naïveté regardless of accents type naIvetE).

You may access North American Indian Biographical Database from anywhere with a valid APSU ID.