Correspondence between John A. Swenson and Jeff Kaimowitz (Director, Watkinson Library), 1989

The American Indian Collection is a small, eclectic collection of 18th and 19th century materials related to indigenous peoples in North America and their languages. The highlight of this artificial collection is the original manuscript of French Jesuit missionary Rev. Jacques Gravier (1651-1708), entitled 'Dictionary of the Algonquin Illinois Language' (ca. 1700), which was acquired and partially transcribed by James Hammond Trumbull (1821-1897), a noted philologist and statesman. It also includes correspondence from various institutions of white imperialism which interacted with Native Americans, including the U.S. Army and the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology. The collection also contains two Catholic liturgy and prayer books (in manuscript) partially written in Abenaki, along with notebooks by amateur linguists, historians, and antiquarians (such as Samuel Gardner Drake) containing vocabularies related to the Seminole, Menominee, Ojibwe, Mickmac, and Sioux-Dakota languages.

Also included are supplemental materials from the 1990s about the Gravier Algonquin-Illinois Dictionary, as well as a small folder of manuscripts and correspondence involving the study of the Kiowa language by Parker Paul McKenzie, identified in the documents as a "member of the Kiowa tribe."

Materials were added to the collection at unknown times related to additional subjects about American Indians.