Digital libraries: Yale University Library to digitize original documents on new England’s native Americans

Yale University Library has received a grant of $250,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support “The New England Indian Papers Series” an online compendium of important and rare historical documents relating to the Native American peoples of Connecticut during the colonial period from First Contact to 1783. The grant is part of the NEH’s “We the People” program, which encourages and strengthens the teaching, study and understanding of American history and culture.

Several institutions with significant New England Indian collections – including Yale, the Connecticut State Library, the Connecticut Historical Society, the Massachusetts Archives and the National Archives of the United Kingdom – have formed a collaborative archival and educational initiative called the Yale Indian Papers Project (YIPP).

The project will address the restoration of lost history by publishing an electronic database, “The New England Indian Papers Series.” As the first in the series, “The Connecticut Colony Collection” will comprise over 1,400 primary source materials written by, about or for Connecticut Indians. Taken together, the documents reveal a continued Native American presence in the region, as well as the Native American experience in a colonial world. The database will allow researchers and the general public to explore nearly 400 years of New England Native American history, community, culture, sovereignty, land, migration, law and politics, as well as issues of gender, race, and identity.