AISRI at Indiana University

Projects

Projects | Research | Editorial | Educational

Editorial Projects

Editorial projects that make the results of research widely available to scholars, tribal members, and the general public is one of the primary goals of AISRI. Publication of important documents, employing the highest standard of historical editing, is a major focus. Throughout the history of the study of American Indians, Indians and non-Indians alike have recorded a vast range of descriptive material—ethnographic, historical, and linguistic—that has remained unpublished in archives. Preparation of those materials for publication requires interdisciplinary skills, drawing on the concepts and methods of anthropology, history, and linguistics, to make those documents optimally useful for understanding the American Indian past.

The range of editorial projects in which AISRI members have been and are engaged includes the following:

Historical documents, comprising journals and other writings of fur traders and explorers of the Great Plains, particularly the central and northern Plains, as well more recent manuscripts relating to American Indian cultures written by anthropologists and by Indian people themselves.
Linguistic texts, comprising transcriptions and translations of the oral traditions of various Plains tribal groups, particularly members of the Caddoan (Arikara, Pawnee, Kitsai) and Siouan (Sioux and Assiniboine) language families.
Unratified treaties, a recently completed project that compiled a comprehensive set of treaties between the U.S. Government and various Indian tribes that were never ratified. The result of the project is a book, Documents of American Indian Diplomacy Treaties, Agreements, and Conventions, 1775-1979, edited by Vine Deloria, Jr. and Raymond J. DeMallie, published by the University of Oklahoma Press.
Plains volume of the Handbook of North American Indians, volume 13, to be published by the Smithsonian Institution under the general editorship of William C. Sturtevant.