The Arthur J. Hines films collection contains audio and film recordings that were created by amateur filmmaker and World War II veteran Arthur J. Hines. The materials document contemporary American Indian lives and includes footage of powwows and of prominent American Indian artists and athletes, circa 1950-1979.

The General Manuscripts and Ephemera collections contains documents ane ephemera concerning people, events, and activities related to the historical and contemporary lives of Native peoples throughout the Western Hemisphere.

This collection contains 85 glass plate negatives depicting Iroquois students and student life at the Thomas Indian School on the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation in New York state, circa 1900-1945.

These records document the governance and programmatic activities of the Museum of the American Indian/Heye Foundation (MAI) from its inception in 1904 until its sublimation by the Smithsonian Institution in 1990. The types of materials present in this collection include personal and institutional correspondence, individual subject files, minutes and annual reports, financial ledgers, legal records, expedition field notes, research notes, catalog and object lists, publications, clippings, flyers, maps, photographs, negatives and audio-visual materials. These materials span a varied range of subjects relating to the activities of the museum which are more fully described on the series level.

Photographs shot by William A. Newcombe during three collecting trips to British Columbia with George Gustav Heye, director of the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation. Between 1934 and 1938 Newcombe and Heye collected and photographed among the collecting ethnographic materials from the Saanich, Esquimalt, Cowichan, Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwakiutl), Snuneymuxw (Nanaimo), and Nuxalk (Bellacoola) communities.

The Edward S. Curtis photogravure plates and proofs for The North American Indian include photogravure printing plates and associated proofs made from Curtis photographs and used in the publication of The North American Indian volumes 1-9 and 12-19. The bulk of the images are portraits, though there are also images of everyday items, ceremonial artifacts, and camps.

The collection of Kimowan McLain, significant First Nations artist, contains materials related to his artistic practice and his personal life. The materials include not only photographs of his art, completed and in-progress, but also sketchbooks and journal entries that give important context to his major works and artistic practices. The materials range from his early career in the early 1990s as a magazine editor to his solo and group exhibitions to his time as an art professor at various universities and images of his final works in 2011. McLain balanced both Western and Native artistic methods and history in his work, his archive provides valuable insight into the swiftly evolving and often contested world of contemporary Native American art.

The Mary Harriman Rumsey collection largely consists of photographic prints and lantern slides documenting the Harriman Expedition to Alaska in summer 1899. These depict members of the expedition and Alaskan scenery and people. The collection also includes scenic photographs of Alaska taken by Dora Keen in 1914 and photographs of Blackfeet, Hopi, Apache, and Suquamish Indians made by Edward Curtis in 1900 and 1903.

This collection of films produced and acquired by the Museum of the American Indian (MAI) contains materials created by and for the MAI as ethnographic studies and as documentation of its own activities (including archaeological expeditions and cultural exchanges) between 1917 and 1938. Tribes represented include: Arikara, Crow, Navajo, Pilaga, Pue...

The Arctic Circle records include materials gathered by Bert and Ellen Witt for their private gallery of Inuit art The Arctic Circle. These materials include native artists information which is organized by community, reference material organized topically, slides from the gallery's annual print collections as well as photographs of scupltures and textiles displayed in the gallery. Much of the reference material used by the gallery pertains to native communities in the Nunavet Territory of Canada such as Cape Dorset and Baker Lake as well as other small communities throughout the Northwest Territiories. Additionally photographs taken by Bert and Ellen Witt's son Tony during a trip to Canada in 1973 are included in this collection.