Native American Press in Wisconsin and the Nation, 1982 to the present

As the universities withdrew from the field, regional collections developed in historical societies and other state entities. By 1982, institutions such as the California State Library, Arizona State Library, Arizona State Museum, Oklahoma Historical Society, and Alaska State Library had created modest to fairly comprehensive collections for their states. The work of the Wisconsin Historical Society, however, eclipsed all efforts. It was, in fact, the only institution in the country that had undertaken the task of systematically collecting the products of the Native press published throughout the United States and Canada. Under James Danky's leadership, the Newspapers and Periodicals unit had built what was the premier collection of the Native press. Of the 1,164 titles Danky and Hady had described in their 1982 bibliography, the Society held slightly over 700.

Collecting contemporary Native newspapers and periodicals had become a part of the long-range plan of the Wisconsin Historical Society. Considering the society's long history of newspaper collecting, Danky told the 1982 conference members:

   Today I hope the Society is making another step in the maturation
   process, that is, by trying to move from the antiquarian interest
   that has been a part of our work and to develop a sense of
   continuity with the past by documenting contemporary Native
   American life. The conference will, as it seems, create additional
   documentation through the speakers who will provide primary
   evidence about current publications. (Danky, Hady, & Morris, 1982,
   p. 10)

Since 1982, the Newspapers and Periodical unit of the society has continued to build its collection of Native publications so that today, in microform and hard copy combined, it is probably the nation's largest. It is rivaled only by the collection of the American Native Press Archives in the Sequoyah Research Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

By the time Deloria's comments about the desire for a national Indian repository appeared in 1983, the idea of such an institution had already begun to form in our minds. Completion of the Danky and Hady bibliographic project in 1982 contributed greatly to the thoroughness of our reference guide project as did the excellent collection of publications at the Society. After we had exhausted the holdings there, we traveled to repositories all around the country, ferreting out copies of rifles we had not seen and additional issues of rifles we had already studied. We meticulously recorded which issues of each title we examined in each repository.

What we encountered caused us to pause and look beyond our present project. Certain realities became clear very quickly. Most libraries held only scattered issues, those issues were not catalogued, and they were kept in vertical files or stacked in closets and only occasionally in library stacks. The significance of the efforts of the Wisconsin Historical Society to collect the Native press from throughout Indian Country loomed larger in our minds. Because collections were not catalogued, we frequently had to ask a series of questions before we were directed to vertical files or "Indian" files. After two years of such experiences, we thought that it might be helpful to create a clearinghouse of information on the Native press as a service to scholars and librarians. Because of our meticulous note taking, we could supply location information on hundreds of titles. Thus in 1983, we began the American Indian and Alaska Native Periodicals Clearinghouse.