Includes folktales and ethnological notes. Many of the latter have to do with war, kinship relations, and sexual practices.

Joanna Cohan Scherer was employed by the Smithsonian Institution from 1966-2006. She worked at the Smithsonian Office of Anthropology Archives (later known as the National Anthropological Archives) as a museum technician until 1970 when she was asked to become illustrations researcher of the Handbook of North American Indians, a 20-volume ...

Scrapbook entitled "Our Wild Indians in Peace and War: Surveys, Expeditions, Mining and Scenery of the Great West," compiled by James E. Taylor, possibly as a source for his own illustrations.

Image of parade of American Indians during the 1928 Pendleton Round-up in Pendleton, Oregon.

Photographs depicting Apache people and United States military personnel and their families in and around Fort Apache, Arizona. The bulk of the photographs were made by Mason and are mounted on unbound photo album pages.

The J.B. Moore copper printing plates include 15 copper plates used in illustrating J.B. Moore's catalog, The Navajo (Crystal, Navajo Reservation, New Mexico: J.B. Moore, 1911). The plates depict rugs created by Navajo weavers that J.B. Moore had for sale at his trading post in 1911.

An exhibition of New Orleans photographer J. Nash Porter's portraits of the Mardi Gras Indians, capturing them at close range and documenting their "true essence" and "cultural flavor" from an insider's point of view. The exhibit, held at the museum from April 23, 2006 - October 15, 2006, featured more than 40 images documenting the rich tradition of New Orleans' Mardi Gras Indians including the construction of suits (handmade costumes), practices, second liners, and other participants in this urban folk street ritual. On display also were full Mardi Gras Indian suits and beaded patches. For more than 35 years, Porter (1942-2007) documented the masking traditions and community support of the Black Mardi Gras Indians. These records include correspondence and video footage.

The majority of Pearse-Hocker's momentous negatives give eyewitness account to two weeks of both the mundane and brutal reality of daily life during the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. The takeover of the town and the conflict between about 200 members of AIM (American Indian Movement, the Native American civil rights activist organization begun in the 1968) and the United States Marshals Service began on February 27 and lasted for 71 days, resulting in tragedy on both sides of the conflict. Members of AIM along with some local Oglala (Lakota) Sioux from the local reservation took over the town in protest against the United States Government's history of broken treaties with various Native groups, the poverty and maltreatment of Native populations, as well as in defiance against the corruption and paternalism within the local subsidiary of the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs). The siege finally came to an end on May 5 when members of AIM and the assistant attorney general for the Civil Division of the US Justice Department Harlington Wood Jr. settled on a ceasefire. Kent Frizzell served as Chief Government Negotiator in the capacity of Assistant Attorney General (Land and Natural Resources Division, U. S. Department of Justice) and later as Solicitor, U. S. Department of the Interior. Among those pictured both during and post-conflict are AIM activists Dennis Banks, Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt, Ted and Russell Means, Frank Clearwater, Wallace Black Elk and Anna Mae Pictou Aquash. A small number of negatives also document AIM's takeover of the BIA building and the AIM Powwow both in Minneapolis in 1970.

Twenty drawings in a commercial exercise book that has been rebound. The book had been sewn into a second cover prior to its acquisition by the Smithsonian. This second cover was removed when the book was rebound. It is still with the manuscript. The drawings depict hunting, courtship, dance, social gatherings, Indian scouts, mounted and dismounted...

This collection of twenty-three cabinet card photographs was collected by Alice Kennedy Eagan, and depicts Native American and non-native life in the Fort Still, Oklahoma Territory, circa 1894-1896.