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

No sooner had we done that than librarians changed the course of our thinking once more. Finding Indian newspapers and periodicals generally a cataloguer's nightmare, librarians had frequently kept them in loose files. They were at times glad to weed them and, at times, give them to us. The first windfall came at the Arizona State Museum in 1983, when the librarian gave us, literally, a pickup truck load of weeded newspapers and periodicals to take back to Arkansas. Then came a similar shipment from the American Indian Studies Center Library at the University of California at Los Angeles. By 1985 we were calling ourselves an archive. Once we established the American Native Press Archives, other major weeded collections followed. In recent years such donations have come from Haskell Indian Nations University, the University of Tulsa, and the National Indian Law Library. In the 1980s, the Wisconsin Historical Society began to send us the hard copies after completing microfilming, and the Society has routinely sent its duplicate copies to us through the years. The Oklahoma Historical Society has a similar arrangement with the American Native Press Archives. The result is that the American Native Press Archives houses the world's largest hard-copy collection of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Canadian Aboriginal newspapers and periodicals.

We took Danky's new mission statement in 1982--"documenting contemporary Native American life"--and expanded it into the mission of the American Native Press Archives: to document contemporary tribal communities through the words of the tribal peoples themselves. Thus we have not limited our collection to newspapers and periodicals but have included other materials related to the Native press. We archive the records of the Native American Journalists Association, which constitute a massive collection, and we have major collections for organizations such as MIGIZI Communications as well as for writers, editors, reporters, producers, and others associated with the Native press.

CONCLUSION

It is difficult for us to work long at the Sequoyah Research Center, which houses the American Native Press Archives, without being reminded in some way of James Danky and the conference "Native American Press in Wisconsin and the Nation" in 1982. We might see the familiar stamp of the Wisconsin Historical Society on a newspaper the Society has discarded and sent to us. We might have occasion to refer to the Danky and Hady bibliography or one of our own reference guides for answers to a patron's question. We might have need to search for something in our massive Press History Collection, the Richard V. La Course Collection, the Paul DeMain Collection, or the News from Indian Country Collection. We might simply print a letter on letterhead for the Center, which bears DeMain's name as one of our stalwart Advisory Board members, and causes us to remember that shortly before his death La Course had also agreed to serve. (3) Everywhere are reminders of that meeting in 1982 that resulted in a cooperative relationship that led to the most complete bibliographic documentation and history of the Native press written to date and that contributed directly to the development of the nation's two largest library and archives collections of Native press materials. To us it was a watershed event, of which we, Wisconsin, and the nation are still reaping the benefits.