Found in a cave in the highlands of the northern Andes along with 28 mummies, a rare cotton textile a The British Museum holds, in its collections, a rare textile made from cotton and painted with brown, red, and blue inks.
Creators: Unknown, Muisca.
Date of Creation: 14th-15th century CE
Place of origin: Gachancipá
Physical measurements: 122 cm x 135 cm
Materials: Cotton, ink
Process by which it was made: Weaving
Current location: British Museum
Information contributed by Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez.
Courtesy of the US Forest Service, Ketchikan Ranger District
Erected in the early 1880s by a Tlingit leader, barely a decade after the United States had claimed Alaska from Russia, this pole became popular with white Alaskans who read it as a memorial to Abraham Lincoln.
Creators: Original pole carved by Thleda (Nisgaʼa) for a patron from the Gaanax.ádi Raven clan of the Taantʼa kwáan (or “Tongass”) Tlingit; replica carved for the Saxman Totem Park by Charles Staastʼ Brown (Saanya kwáan Neix.ádi)
Date of Creation: Original c. 1882; replica June 1940
Place of origin: Kadukguká, Tlingit village on Tongass Island, Alaska
Physical measurements: Approx. 40ʼ high
Materials: Red cedar, paint
Process by which it was made: Carving, painting
Current location: Replica of entire pole in the Saxman Totem Park, Saxman, Alaska; original “Lincoln” finial in the Alaska State Museum, Juneau, Alaska
Painted by Native artists in the late sixteenth century, it includes information on the Christian and Aztec calendars, European medical astrology, and a history of pre-conquest and early colonial Mexico City.
Creators: Anonymous Nahua Scribes
Date of Creation: ca. 1578, updated over time
Place of origin: Mexico City
Physical measurements: 51 leaves, 102 pages, 10 cm x 20 cm
Materials: Paint on Native bark paper
Process by which it was made: Painting
Current location: Bibliothèque National de France.
Further Reading
Boone, Elizabeth Hill. Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mexica. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.
Boone, Elizabeth Hill. Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007.
Delbrugge, Laura. Reportorio de los tiempos. London: Tamesis, 1999.
Diel, Lori Boornazian. The Codex Mexicanus: A Guide to Life in Late Sixteenth-Century New Spain. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018.
Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.
An early twentieth-century response to a survey of recent graduates of a Native American boarding school.
Creator: Chauncey Yellow Robe
Date of Creation: 1910
Place of origin: Survey created in Carlisle, Pennsylvania; survey filled out in Rapid City, South Dakota.
Physical measurements: 3 pages
Materials: Paper, graphite, and ink.
Process by which it was made: Handwriting on a pre-printed survey form.
Current location: National Archives and Records Administration
Further Reading
Adams, David Wallace. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995.
Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations, edited by Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Susan D. Rose, 43-53. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press (2016). https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1dwssxz.7.
Pexa, Christopher J. Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakhóta Oyáte. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
Warrior, Robert. The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.Yellow Robe, Chauncey. “The Autobiography of An Indian Boy.” How the Silent Enemy Was Made. Cline Printing Co., 1930: 4, 17.
An unpublished book that complicates the politics of Native-colonist relationships that became inflamed in the mid-1670s.
Creator: Daniel Gookin
Date of Creation: 1677
Place of origin: Massachusetts Bay Colony
Physical measurements: 300 [4], 99, [3] p. ; 21cm high and 17 cm wide
Materials: Paper and ink
Process by which it was made: Handwriting
Current location: The Newberry Library, Chicago.
Further Reading
Richard W. Cogley, John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians before King Philip’s War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Kristina Bross, Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).
David D. Hall, Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-making in Seventeenth-century New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
J. Patrick Cesarini, “What Has Become of Your Praying to God?” Daniel Gookin’s Troubled History of King Philip’s War,” Early American Literature, Vol. 44, No. 3 (2009): 489-515.
Jenny Hale Pulsipher, “Massacre at Hurtleberry Hill: Christian Indians and English Authority in Metacom’s War,” William and Mary Quarterly Vol. 53, No. 3 (Jul., 1996): 459-486.
Information contributed by David D. Hall and Adrian Chastain Weimer.
The earliest extant letter written by a Native person in a Native language in what is now the United States.
Creators: Don Manuel, cacique of Asile
Date of Creation: 1651
Place of origin: Asile, Timucua town of Florida
Physical measurements: 2 pages
Materials: Paper
Process by which it was made: Handwriting
Current location: Original housed at the Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla, Spain.
Further Reading
Alyssa Mt. Plesant, Caroline Wigginton, and Kelly Wisecup, “Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies: Completing the Turn,” The William and Mary Quarterly 75:2 (2018) 207-36.
Amy Turner Bushnell, “Patricio De Hinachuba: Defender of the Word of God, the Crown of the King, and the Little Children of Ivitachuco.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 3, no. 3 (1979): 1-2George Aaron Broadwell & Alejandra Dubcovsky, “Chief Manuel’s 1651 Timucua letter: The oldest letter in a Native language of the United States,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. Forthcoming.
Alejandra Dubcovsky and George Aaron Broadwell. “Writing Timucua: Recovering and Interrogating Indigenous Authorship.” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 15, no. 3 (2017): 409-41.
Jerald T. Milanich, The Timucua. (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1996).
Information contributed by Alejandra Dubcovsky and George Aaron Broadwell.
