A Survey of Significant and Vulnerable California Indian Archives in Private Collections

FAIN: PB-276735-20

Earth Island Institute Inc. (Berkeley, CA 94704-1375)
Malcolm Margolin (Project Director: May 2020 to July 2023)

Retention of core staff at the California Indian Archives Project, and hiring of summer interns, to identify and document significant collections of Native American archival material in private hands in California, eventually leading to a plan to preserve them. 

This effort will help retain current staff and consultants for six months while hiring a cohort of new researchers whose anticipated employment for the summer would otherwise need to be cancelled due to the Covid-19 related loss of a major grant and diminished fundraising revenue. The core staff of the California Indian Archives Project of Earth Island Institute's California Institute for Community, Art & Nature will engage with a state-wide coalition of academic and tribal partnering organizations to identify significant collections of archival material in private hands and to develop the organizational structure, policies, and resources to preserve them. Immediate goals are to choose four especially rich archival collections from leaders of the Native artistic renaissance of the last 50 years, and to launch researchers on documenting them and preparing them for acquisition by a museum or library. Researchers will be younger scholars mentored by renowned experts in the field.