The Amherst College Collection of Native American Literature

An interview with Mike Kelly on Indigenous literary history and the importance of culturally appropriate cataloging.

Posted on September 25, 2025 in Ask an Archivist

In this interview, Mike Kelly, Head of Archives & Special Collections at Amherst College, joins Choice to discuss the Amherst College Collection of Native American Literature. Mike details the collection’s aim to center early texts from Indigenous authors, showcasing the breadth of Native literary history. Mike also shares how Amherst works directly with Indigenous communities and incorporates culturally sensitive cataloging into its collections. Further, Mike covers the development of the Native American Literary Atlas, highlighting several of its features.

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Could you provide a brief overview of the Collection of Native American Literature? How did the collection come to Amherst?

In 2012 Amherst College hired two new Native Studies faculty—Lisa Brooks and Kiara Vigil; both of them visited the Archives to ask what materials we held to support their classes. As we were assessing our holdings and contemplating how to acquire material to support their teaching and research, the private collection of Pablo Eisenberg came on the market. Eisenberg spent decades collecting Native-authored books and Amherst was able to purchase his collection of nearly 1,500 books thanks to a generous gift from Younghee Kim-Wait (Class of 1982). Since that first delivery in August 2013, we have more than doubled the size of the collection which currently stands at 3,827 items (as of 5/16/25). The Amherst College Archives already had strong holdings of canonical colonial works about Native Americans, such as Edward Curtis’s The North American Indian (1907-1930) and History of the Indian Tribes of North America by McKenney and Hall (1838-1844), but almost nothing that represented a Native perspective. The goal of the collection is to document the long history of Indigenous engagement with Anglo-American printing and publishing over the past 300+ years, a history that has largely been overlooked, but has received more attention in recent years.

As stated on the collection’s homepage, the collection “represents some of the earliest published writing by Native authors.” The homepage also cites an excerpt from the Creek scholar Craig Womack’s 1999 book, Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism, which underscores that, “Most approaches to the ‘Native American Literary Renaissance’ have proceeded as if the Indian discovered the novel, the short story, and the poem only yesterday.” What is the importance of centering early, foundational texts by Native authors? How do these texts shape the wider collection?

I imagine the collection has opened up a wealth of research opportunities. How have you seen the collection being used by students, researchers, and faculty?

In the fall of 2023 through spring of 2024, the Mead Art Museum at Amherst mounted a major exhibition of Indigenous works, including over 100 books from the Native American Literature Collection: “Boundless: Native American Abundance in Art and Literature.” Guest curator Heid E. Erdrich (Ojibwe) and Mead Director of Curatorial Affairs, Lisa Crossman, juxtaposed books by Native writers ranging from the 1770s to the present alongside new works by living Native artists and other selections from the museum’s collection. The forthcoming catalog, which will appear in print and be freely available open access online through Amherst College Press, celebrates both the abundance of Native art and writing and the many ways they intersect.

Perhaps the most exciting area of research are efforts to incorporate Indigenous research methodologies into the daily work of libraries, archives, and museums. The Information School at the University of Washington has identified “Indigenous Knowledge” as a major area of research and study for their program. Considering the long and often traumatic history of colonial institutions collecting Indigenous artifacts, we strive for transparency around our collecting practices and are eager to incorporate Indigenous approaches to museums, libraries, and archives in our work.

The website for the Collection of Native American Literature includes the following note: “This website along with policies and procedures related to the Amherst College Collection of Native American Literature are part of an on-going process of collaboration, outreach, and networking with Indigenous community members and the Five Colleges Native American and Indigenous Studies academic community to allow for existing policies and practices to more accurately reflect and respect Indigenous ways of knowing, and tribal sovereignty.” Could you speak more about Amherst’s work with Indigenous communities and the necessity of these collaborations?

We have been fortunate to work with several Native partners in New England and beyond; I have also been an active member of the Association of Tribal Archives Libraries and Museums (ATALM) as a way to connect with communities across the continent. Shortly after we acquired the collection, we received a grant from IMLS in 2016 to hold a gathering of Native librarians, scholars, and community leaders to think together about the ethical curation of such a collection. We also focused our outreach efforts on nearby tribes, and we have ongoing relationships with the Nipmuc, Mohegan, and Wampanoag communities.

Amherst faculty regularly invite tribal members to speak on campus, and a stop to look at relevant materials in the collection is almost always part of those visits. When Nipmuc artist and writer Kohar Avakian came to campus to speak in the fall of 2024, we also scheduled time during her visit for her to view collection materials. Elizabeth James Perry (Wampanoag Aquinnah) spent a year at Amherst as an artist in residence and her work was featured in an exhibition at the Mead Art Museum in 2023. In 2023 after a group from Amherst visited the Tantaquidgeon Museum at Mohegan, we then invited their museum and library staff to visit us at Amherst. That visit also included a viewing of the BOUNDLESS exhibition mounted at the Mead Art Museum. The opening reception for the BOUNDLESS exhibition was a truly remarkable gathering of contemporary Native folks from across the Northeast.

One unique item in the collection is a copy of The History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan (1887) by an Odawa author that is bound in birchbark and porcupine quills by the author’s sister, Margaret Boyd. Thanks to our outreach efforts, we connected with a member of that Odawa community, Eric Hemenway, Director of the Department of Repatriation, Archives, and Records for the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians in Michigan. Eric came to visit the Archives and view this unique book object and then asked if we would be willing to lend it back to the community for a brief visit. In the summer of 2024, we brought the book to visit the Odawa community for a week of events before returning it to the Archives in Amherst.

I understand that Amherst received a grant from the Mellon Foundation that enabled the creation of the Native American Literary Atlas. What does this project entail, and what are its wider goals?

The idea for the Native American Literary Atlas emerged from our IMLS grant-funded gathering in 2016; given the importance of place and land, we wanted to explore how we could use catalog data to display the holdings of this collection geographically and/or by tribal affiliation. We learned very early on that researchers were interested in identifying books in the collection by tribal affiliation and we wanted a simple way for communities to discover what we hold by their members. We also wanted to make as much material available for free online as we could, but we understood the need to balance that goal with protecting Indigenous knowledge. The Mellon grant made it possible for folks from Amherst to visit several communities to share details about the collection, our ideas for it, and to hear more from them about their needs. We were fortunate to hire a fantastic Project Manager—Brandon Castle (Ts’msyen)—who was a great thought partner and skilled administrator. We are even more fortunate that he is still in the neighborhood now that the grant is over; he is the first-ever Native American and Indigenous Studies Librarian at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

One facet of the Native American Literary Atlas is a timeline. Have you observed any thematic trends over time or differences in the types of materials published (sermons, biographies, books, constitutions, etc.)?

Getting to know the contours of Native literary history is an ongoing journey. Sermons and other Christian religious texts were definitely more prevalent before the end of the nineteenth century, and the past decade has seen an explosion of Native comics, graphic novels, and zines. Autobiographies and memoirs have been a consistent presence since William Apess first published A Son of the Forest in 1829; Sasha LaPointe’s Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk (2023) is among the more recent examples in this genre. I have also noticed that many Indigenous-authored books include unexpected extra-textual materials—for example, the novel Queen of the Woods by Simon Pokagon (Potawatamie) includes an appendix that reproduces several news articles about Pokagon’s death, some of Pokagon’s other published works, and photographs of traditional birchbark and quillwork crafts. Kelly Wisecup’s recent book Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures (Yale, 2021) explores this aspect of early Native books.

The Native American Literary Atlas also includes two maps, the Northeast Indigenous Literature map and the Northeast Knowledge Centers map. Why chart Native archives, collections, and publishing centers geographically? How do these maps facilitate knowledge sharing between libraries and archives?

Plotting books on a map based on place of publication reveals interesting patterns and raises questions; what books are published by communities on or near tribal homelands, and what books come from major presses in cities far from the community? We intend to continue experimenting with maps and tools that can display the contents of the collection in ways that make it more accessible to all users, but particularly Native communities.

How do the Native American Literature Collection and Native American Literary Atlas incorporate Indigenous methodologies? How do both ensure the use of culturally appropriate metadata?

We are taking two approaches to culturally sensitive cataloging and metadata practices. First, we are using the existing standards and practices of rare book cataloging to be as transparent as possible about how we acquire materials for the collection. Provenance and former ownership notes are standard for special collections, so we include that information in our notes. Early on we began asking Native authors to inscribe their books to the collection whenever possible; we want to make sure that the authors know where their book is going and to highlight that in our records. We use another notes field to add tribal affiliations to records as well and we have applied the LCSH “Literary hoaxes” in instances of fraudulent claims to Native identity.

Second, one of the conclusions from our recent Mellon grant is that there are many excellent Indigenous-led initiatives under way; we quickly realized that it makes much more sense for us to lend our support to these projects than to start something new on our own. We joined the Local Contexts project as a Hub; we pay annual dues that enable us to use the Notices that have been developed for colonial institutions. We prominently feature the “Engagement” Notice on our pages; this signals to Indigenous communities that we are open and eager to collaborate. We also have a page within the Local Contexts Hub network that directs people to our collection and also invites collaborators. These sometimes feel like very small interventions, but they are concrete steps toward repairing the exploitative collecting and cataloging practices of the past three centuries.

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About the interviewee:

Mike Kelly is the Head of the Archives & Special Collections at Amherst College.

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Learn more about the Collection of Native American Literature.

This interview was conducted by Ashley Roy. She is the digital media assistant at Choice.

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