Edward E. Ayer Digital Collection

The Edward E. Ayer Digital Collection features several thousand digitized images and texts selected from the Ayer Collection, including the sixteenth-century manuscripts of Father Bernardino de Sahagún, widely considered to be the first ethnohistorian of the Americas. An expansion of items previously available in the Ayer Art Digital Collection, Great Lakes Digital Collection, and North American Indian Photographs, this digital resource will grow as we continue to make these primary source documents freely available online.

Indians of the Midwest, Past and Present

Conceived and developed by the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, “Indians of the Midwest, Past and Present” multimedia educational website engages and informs a broad public audience about major issues in American Indian history and culture. Marrying the library’s rich collections on Native American history with state-of-the art interactive web capabilities, the site contributes to the public discourse on contemporary issues involving American Indians— such as tribal sovereignty, hunting and fishing rights, casinos, treaties, museum collections, identity and stereotypes. These issues are discussed in the context of the history and cultures of the tribes in the Great Lakes region.