Research Guides: Native American &amp; Indigenous Studies: Art & Literature

Collections of Native Literature, Art, & Performance

These collections focus on various forms of Indigenous creative works.

North American Indian Drama This link opens in a new window
This edition of North American Indian Drama contains 172 plays by 33 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more.
Abbreviation: naid
Vendor: Alexander Street, a ProQuest Company
Subjects: Literature, Theatre
Type: Datasets / Statistics, E-Book Collections, Encyclopedias & Dictionaries, Historical / Primary Sources, Images, Newspapers and Newswires
North American Indian Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window
North American Indian Thought and Culture integrates autobiographies, biographies, Indian publications, oral histories, personal writings, photographs, drawings, and audio files. The accounts offer a direct window into Indian attitudes toward the earliest European settlers and the resultant transformations that took place, first as trade was established and later as displacement forced tribes into unfamiliar territories. The collection presents the entire spectrum of native people's experiences from their own point of view.
Abbreviation: naitc
Vendor: Alexander Street, a ProQuest Company
Subjects: Anthropology, Cultural Heritage, History
Type: Historical / Primary Sources

Museums

The following select museums preserve major collections of Native American art and artifacts and provide many online resources.

Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian
The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) has one of the most extensive collections of Native American arts and artifacts in the world—approximately 266,000 catalog records (825,000 items) representing over 12,000 years of history and more than 1,200 indigenous cultures throughout the Americas.
Denver Art Museum
The Denver Art Museum was one of the first art museums in the nation to collect Indigenous arts from North America. As early as 1925, the DAM recognized and valued the fine aesthetic qualities of Native arts, when many other institutions only valued them as anthropological material. While we collected the early artwork of Indigenous people, we also focused on the work of contemporary Native artists at every moment in time.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Featuring the Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection
Seattle Art Museum
View collection highlights from the SAM's collection featuring Indigenous art and artifacts of the Pacific Northwest.

Search for Indigenous Arts

There are databases of art and literature that cover many cultures and time periods. Try searching for forms of Indigenous creative works within these broader collections.

Artstor (changing to JSTOR) This link opens in a new window
ARTstor is a digital library more than 1.5 million images in the areas of art, architecture and more. It uses the same tags as the Library of Congress, so try searching for "Indian art" or use a specific name, such as "Cherokee Indians" to narrow your search to Indigenous works.
The ARTstor Digital Library is used by educators, scholars, and students at a variety of institutions including universities, colleges, museums, public libraries, and K-12 schools. The Digital Library serves users both within the arts and in disciplines outside of the arts. This includes historians of art and architecture and others engaged in the visual arts, as well as individuals in fields as diverse as American Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies, Classical Studies, Literary Studies, Medieval Studies, Music, Religious Studies, and Renaissance Studies, all of whom find the images in ARTstor to be relevant to their teaching and research.

Tutorials:
Using ARTstor
Training videos on YouTube

Abbreviation: artstor
Vendor: ARTstor
Subjects: Archaeology, Architecture, Art Education, Art History, Art Therapy, Classics, Cultural Heritage, Interior Design, Museum Studies, Studio Art
Type: Images

Dance in Video

Dance in Video contains dance productions and documentaries by many influential performers and companies of the 20th century, available online in streaming video. Selections cover ballet, tap, jazz, contemporary, experimental, and improvisational dance, as well as pioneers of modern concert dance. This release includes 768 works, equaling 501 hours.

Research in Fine Arts & Literature

In addition to these specialized resources, searching the published scholarship by discipline is a great way to discover Indigenous scholarship and citations to Indigenous creative works. Consult the following guides for more on research in Fine Arts and Literature fields.

*Art History
by Leah Sherman Last Updated Oct 9, 2024 531 views this year
*Dance
by Leah Sherman Last Updated Oct 9, 2024 164 views this year
*English
by Mallary Rawls Last Updated Oct 9, 2024 394 views this year
*Theatre
by Leah Sherman Last Updated Oct 9, 2024 337 views this year
Museum Studies & Cultural Heritage
by Leah Sherman Last Updated Oct 9, 2024 108 views this year

I am grateful to Leah Sherman, Visual & Performing Arts Librarian, for her assistance in identifying and assembling the resources on this page.