Copyright © 2000 NLThomas
All Rights Reserved

STILLWATER, OK - More than 380 treaties concerning Native American Indian tribes are now available on the Internet, courtesy of the Oklahoma State University Library. With a grant from the Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Foundation the OSU Library continued a project started in 1996 to convert a highly used, yet out-of-print compilation of treaties, laws, and executive orders between the United States Government and Native American tribes to digital format.

Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, compiled by Charles J. Kappler and published between 1903-1904, is a seven-volume set of government documents in high demand by Native peoples, researchers, journalists, attorneys, legislators and teachers; however, before the OSU Library's project, there were only five usable copies in the state.

Suzanne Holcombe, assistant professor in the OSU Library Documents Department says. "As one of two federal regional depositories for federal government documents in the state, we realized Indian Affairs was a valuable resource that needed to be made available to the public. We are so pleased to have the support of a major philanthropic foundation like The Coca-Cola Foundation for this vital project. Their funding will allow us to digitize the first three volumes of this important work and make the images and text available on the World-Wide Web." The web address is http://digital.library.okstate.edu

Because of the OSU Library's efforts the complete legal text of all treaties between the United States Government and sovereign Indian nations will be available free of charge to anyone with a computer.

Holcombe led a team of OSU librarians who experimented with different methods of digitizing the treaties during a pilot project. That project, funded by the AMIGOS Bibliographic Council of which OSU is a member, resulted in a web-searchable database of all the pre-removal treaties involving the Five (civilized) Tribes.

"We received a lot of positive feedback about the work we had done in the pilot project. Scholars, students, attorneys and others of Native and non-Native origins strongly encouraged us to continue with the project." In January 1999, the project received the unanimous endorsement of the Inter-tribal Council of the Five Tribes.

"We have completed the digitization of the second volume, which is in high demand because it contains the texts of all of the treaties," Holcombe stated. "We are currently working on volumes one and three." The project will also provide learning opportunities for Native American students on the OSU campus. They will be involved in scanning the pages as images and in the coding of the text so that it may be viewed on the World Wide Web.