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

We also sought to foster research through the establishment of a scholarly journal devoted to the study of the Native press. We began Native Press Research Journal on a shoestring budget in the spring of 1986, and during the next four years we published eleven issues containing twenty-eight articles. Among the editorial consultants for the Journal were DeMain and Leubke. Though short-lived, the Journal proved a useful tool in ferreting out dead titles that we had not seen and informing us of new publications as they were established, and it became a vehicle for continuing our work of writing publication histories for another four years. By the time the Journal was established, however, our attention had already turned from producing scholarship about the Native press to following the Wisconsin Historical Society's lead in collecting press resources for other scholars to use. Our belief was that there could never be too many archives and libraries.

CREATION OF LIBRARY AND ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS

Vine Deloria Jr. had been reluctant to write the foreword to Danky and Hady's 1982 bibliography of Native American periodicals and newspapers. He was certain, he said, "that this effort would be another ill-prepared and incomplete listing--the kind that is done so often today in the name of communication and information" (Deloria, 1983, p. xii). His doubts came from first-hand knowledge of failed attempts by institutions to build representative, much less comprehensive, collections of Native newspapers and periodicals. He wrote:

   Sometime during the late sixties several universities began to
   collect copies of the extant Indian newspapers with the ideal of
   establishing a national Indian archives for the use by future
   scholars. Many of the universities that had entered the field of
   Indian newspapers so energetically suddenly and silently faded from
   the scene. Whether these institutions continue to add to their
   collections or have moved on to other fields now that the interest
   in American Indians has waned remains to be seen. (p. xi)

Indian organizations had tried it as well, but archiving or microfilming was too cost prohibitive. Some universities microfilmed what materials they had and stopped collecting. "Consequently," Deloria said, "there are few places in the United States where one can find a collection sufficiently large to be useful to the student of contemporary Indian affairs" (p. xi). Deloria was correct. As the universities withdrew, the challenge was taken up by other institutions, the foremost of which was the Wisconsin Historical Society.

In 1982, Princeton University was the only university with what might be called a notable collection of Native newspapers and periodicals. Recognizing the ephemeral quality of many publications, librarians realized the need to preserve "contemporary, first-hand accounts written from the native point of view of an important era in their history" (Bush & Fraser, 1970, p. 3). In 1967 the Princeton University Library began collecting. In their guide to the collection three years later, Bush and Fraser said that when they began, "no library could be found which had taken upon itself the responsibility for preserving the entire range of these publications" (p. 3). Although the Princeton collection remains one of the country's most significant, it has been eclipsed during the past two decades. As Deloria noted in 1982, interest had flagged in many universities; Princeton was one of those. Interest had waned considerably by the time we visited there in the early eighties. However, Princeton had made much of its collection accessible to researchers through its arrangement with Clearwater Publishing to reproduce many of the titles in microform.