American Indian voices have been heard throughout history. Oral tradition was and still is a major method used to hand down histories, cultural traditions, and worldviews. In the preservation of tribal histories, the sacred scrolls of the southern Ojibwas tell of the Midewewin. Dakota records called winter counts carry Dakota history through paintings on buffalo robes. The Tohono O'Odhams marked their history on calendar sticks, while knots tied in string kept the biographical records of the Interior Salish.
———All these are reminders of times past, and together they weave a history of Native Americans. Using these devices, American Indians kept alive the identity of their nations with richness and separateness. Unfortunately, written literature fails to touch on the essence of the heartbeat that keeps American Indians proud of their nations and participating in their traditions. Many of the early written sources portray the stereotypic romantic nation of the doe-eyed princess or the savage heathen that is still a part of contemporary literature. It is important, therefore, for students of Native American life to approach written literature on that subject cautiously. The best tool for linking the native peoples who continue to sustain their oral traditions to the world of the written word is the bibliography.
———Bibliographies identify, locate, and provide access to information resources in a variety of formats. Bibliographies serve as maps for the novice researcher as well as for the seasoned scholar, guiding both through a maze of information. Bibliographies lay the groundwork for assessing who did what, where, how, when, and how well through formats that include school and library catalogs, journal articles, bibliographical essays, encyclopedias, handbooks, and almanacs.
———However, researchers need to examine bibliographies carefully if they are seeking an American Indian perspective; bibliographers often mix Indian-authored works with efforts of non-Indian writers, burying the native voice.
———The earliest published work by a Native American in the present-day United States was the Mohegan missionary Samson Occom's A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian, printed in 1772 by Thomas and Samuel Green in New Haven, Connecticut. The works of early American Indian writers have been given due credit in various bibliographies — most comprehensively in Daniel Littlefield and James Parins's Bibliography of Native American writers, 1772-1924 (1982) and its supplement (1985).
———It was not until 1873 that the first purely Indian bibliography was published, Thomas Warren Field's An Essay Towards an Indian Bibliography. This work, published in New York by Scribner, Armstrong, and Company, was actually a sales catalog of the author's personal library. Nevertheless, the Field bibliography is recognized as a reminder of early scholarly interest in American Indians.
———The identification of bibliographies is not always an easy task. The subject entry to look under in most library catalogs is "Indians of North America — Bibliography." Most libraries use the Library of Congress (LC) system to the Dewey Decimal system to classify the holdings. The Dewey system uses numbers, 016.97 being the class where Indian bibliographies are located. The LC system assigns a combination of alphabetical and numeric characters; Indian bibliographies are found in Z1209-Z1210 classes. Merylin Haas's Indians of North America: Methods and Sources for Library Research provides a more detailed description of those classification systems. More library holdings are available on-line, and search by subject is the most beneficial. Be aware, however, that some information sources do not necessarily follow these classification schemes.
———Examining bibliographies produced in different time periods conveys a general idea of the development and progression of guides to American Indian topics. A search of the OCLC national library database produced a list of 144 works classified as American Indian bibliographies published before 1896. (However, it should be kept in mind that the computer cannot differentiate original works from variant editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations.) From 1896 to 1901 letters from the missions to the Jesuits were published in seventy-three volumes as The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents by the Burrows Brothers Company in Cleveland. Thereafter, 54 titles were added to the roster of bibliographies before 1930. More interest in American Indians came to light between 1931 and 1950, as witnessed by the 75 bibliographies published during that period. In the years from 1961 to 1970 there were a total of 217 entries, 66 of which were produced in 1970 alone. In 1975 there appeared 87 of the 590 bibliographies compiled in the years of 1971 to 1980. In the next thirteen years, 581 bibliographic titles were produced.
———Several significant works from this roster deserve specific discussion. For example, in 1941 George Peter Murdock compiled his Ethnographic Bibliographic Bibliography of North America in 168 pates. Published by the Human Relations Area Files Press of New Haven, Connecticut, it is a standard bibliography for American Indian studies. Subsequent editions include the second edition in 1953 with 239 pages and the third edition in 1960 with 393 pages. In 1975, Murdock collaborated with Timothy O'Leary and produced the fourth edition in five volumes. The five volumes of the original publication are arranged according to geographic areas, complete with area maps; the entries are subdivided by tribe. Its 1960 supplement is arranged by author, with extensive subject and tribal indexes. Entries are not annotated, but the supplement includes relevant subject headings within the main entries.
———The Education of the American Indians: A Survey of the Literature by Brewton Berry was prepared for the Special Subcommittee on Indian Education of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare and published by the Government Printing Office in 1969. This unprecedented document covered a wide range of subjects, many of which were historical. The very broad general headings for the 708 titles are "Histories," "Problems," "Causes," and "Indian College Students." Because of the congressional audience, this bibliography has been used as a source for many subsequent works in education.
———The Educational Resources Information Center and the Clearinghouse on Rural Education and Small Schools, commonly referred to as ERIC/CRESS, published American Indian Education: A Selected Bibliography in 1969 and issued nine supplements over the next decade. The intent of this series was to provide a guide to the latest in resources and educational research and/or development.
———In the 1960s the National Indian Education Association (NIEA) identified the need for a comprehensive catalog addressing American Indian media materials, with pertinent bibliographic information. Project MEDIA (Media Evaluations and Dissemination by Indian Americans) was established in 1973 with the goal of identifying, acquiring, reviewing, and evaluating print and non-print media materials. The results were then compiled into a catalog and disseminated to those responsible for fulfilling the educational needs of American Indians. Native American Educations of Media Materials (fall 1977) and Media Evaluations and Dissemination by Indian Americans (2nd. ed., summer 1978) were two of the publications produced by this endeavor. The evaluation process set up by the project was an important achievement because American Indians were involved throughout to assure high quality, accurate and unbiased information. Although the project was short-lived, it provided a framework for citation entry and demonstrated the evaluative skills of native people.
———The Newberry Library Center for the History of the American Indian (subsequently named for its founding director, D'Arcy McNickle), introduced as bibliographic series with titles that compile information by subject, geographic area, and tribe. Under the editorial leadership of William R. Swagerty and Francis Jennings, thirty-one topical bibliographies had been compiled by 1987. Significant features of this series include bibliographical essays and a list of recommended works organized by scholastic levels. The McNickle Center also supported Francis Paul Prucha's A Bibliographic Guide to the History of Indian-White Relations in the United States (1977); Prucha published a supplement to this work in 1982 In 1995 the University of Oklahoma Press published Writings of Indian History, 1985-1990 for the center. Edited by Colin G. Calloway, Jay Miller, and Richard A. Sattler, the bibliography seeks to continue Prucha's work. In addition, Colin Calloway has edited a collection of bibliographic essays, published for McNickle Center by the University of Oklahoma Press as New Directions in American Indian History (1987).
———In 1980 Scarcrow Press began its Native American Bibliography series under the general editorship of Jack W. Marken. The seventeen volumes that appeared by 1994 cover tribal groups, subjects, and geographic areas. Compiled by distinguished experts, these bibliographies are intended to be comprehensive, with annotations accompanying the important entries. More recently, Frederick E. Hoxie and Harvey Markowitz compiled a general bibliography entitled Native Americans: An Annotated Bibliography (1991), which is selective rather than comprehensive in scope. Together these works are useful to students of American Indian studies and library science because they provide a balanced guide to the literature while fulfilling the guidelines for a bibliographic work.
———In 1991, Diane Kendall Hale wrote Researching and Writing Tribal Histories. In it, Hale asserted that there are 341 known published bibliographies. He noted that these titles, other than general compilations, tend to be tribal, geographic, or subject oriented, and more likely to be a combination. Interestingly, Hale observed that several tribes have had fewer than sixteen books written about them and noted that 127 tribes have yet to be described in book form. These inadequacies make geographic and subject bibliographies that much more useful, since a seasoned researcher may identify tribal information in a work that a bibliographer may have categorized simply as regional.
———The information explosion of the 1960s and 1970s created many new bibliographic sources. Whereas authors like Murdock incorporated the use of computers early on in their work, many of the titles mentioned earlier were researched by traditional methods: searching card catalogs, reviewing previously published materials, collecting reading lists, or simply compiling lists of materials that attract one's fancy. With the advent of electronic technology, CDs, and on-line databases, there has been an even more massive information explosion, and the need for bibliographic control has increased. This need is particularly important in a time of tribal self-determination and self-sufficiency.
———Today, Indian people are eager to take advantage of the information superhighway. Like the ancestors who gave direction and guided their communities with their wisdom, Indian bibliographies can be pathfinders that teach us to tread steadfastly while remaining alert and curious. When bibliographies are representative of the true Indian experience and provide a forum of learning, the circle will be complete.

VELMA SALABIYE
American Indian Studies Center
University of California at Los Angeles