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Native American Press in Wisconsin and the Nation, 1982 to the present
Library Trends, Wntr, 2008 by Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., James W. Parins
Although the conference members in 1982 reached consensus about several issues, the proceedings were at times stormy, and the exchanges reached a high pitch. The editors, especially Richard La Course, differed with the scholars on matters of definition, such as what qualified as a Native publication, particularly those devoted to religion and reform, those edited by Natives but aimed at mainstream audiences, and those published by Native organizations but edited by non-Natives (Danky, Hady, & Morris, 1982). We had pondered most of the questions raised as we had assembled lists of publications in the planning stages of our ambitious project to write a reference guide to American Indian and Alaska Native newspapers and periodicals. Although we at times disagreed with the editors, sometimes intensely, we came away from the conference with a clearer understanding of what we wanted to do.
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We shared a common goal with Danky and Hady: to identify as many Native publications as possible within the time allowed for our study. Their bibliography, which they supplied to us in the draft stage, was critical to our work. We adopted for our project the criterion they used, newspapers and periodicals published by and for Native Americans, to determine which titles we would study. By limiting our study to American Indian and Alaska Native titles, however, we differed from them. We included not only the United States titles in their bibliography but hundreds more because our study lasted four years, making it possible for us to visit more repositories and to include titles established between 1982, when theirs ended, and 1985. We chose to involve other scholars, whose tasks were to ferret out titles that we had not listed, research titles of their choice, and write publication histories of those titles. Ultimately, forty-one Native and non-Native scholars from fields such as library, archives, history, literature, and anthropology engaged in the work. In addition to their work, we spent four years visiting repositories in all parts of the country, studying periodicals, and writing the vast majority of the publication histories. The result was three volumes of historical reference guides to American Indian and Alaska Native newspapers and periodicals that included publication histories of about 1,800 titles in the periods 1826-1924 (Littlefield & Parins, 1984), 1925-1970 (Littlefield & Parins, 1986a), and 1971-1985 (Littlefield & Parins, 1986b). Along with the Danky and Hady bibliography, the Littlefield and Parins reference guides remain the most comprehensive reference works on the Native press.
By 1985, we believed that opportunity existed to advance scholarship related to the Native press. The Danky and Hady bibliography was in print, one of our reference guides had been published, and the other two were in press. In addition, the Native press was receiving new attention because of the establishment, in 1984, of the Native American Press Association, later the Native American Journalists Association. Having established a network of scholars in the field during our recent project, we also established the American Native Press Research Association (ANPRA) in 1984 and held our first meeting as a session of the Mid-America American Studies Association meeting that year in Urbana, Illinois. Barbara Leubke from the 1982 conference spoke at the first ANPRA meeting, and Paul DeMain at the second. After Illinois, meetings were held in Arkansas, Alaska, Mississippi, and Wisconsin before the organization went defunct.
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