Monday, February 10, 2025
35.8 F
Pawhuska
HomeCommunityIndian Rights Association collection publicized with $19K donation

Indian Rights Association collection publicized with $19K donation

The historic collection is now available to all users of the Tulsa City-County Library

Verified News Network presented the Tulsa City-County Library with a $19,000 donation to license the digital records of the Indian Rights Association at the Intertribal Symposium on July 12.

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania owned a private collection of 350,000 documents in 482 boxes in their facility that were produced or collected by the IRA. Many of these records have never been available to the general public.

According to the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, the IRA was founded in the late 1800s and led the way in setting a national agenda for the plight of Native Americans. The IRA was not tribal or government-affiliated, but the organization advocated and promoted Native American rights.

For years, the documents were being leased primarily to educational institutions across the United States. Included in the records are documents about tribes in and outside of Oklahoma, notes, letters, photos and many other documents about tribes from the 1880s to the 1980s.

“This is American Indian history, but it’s American Indian history that was developed by, created and produced by this private entity,” said Brittany Harlow, the director and lead journalist at VNN. “Even though it’s Native American history, these aren’t Native American artifacts. This was all created and produced by the IRA themselves by the work that they did in these communities.”

Harlow came across the records last year while researching a historical event involving the exploitation of Oklahoma tribes.

“I came across the Indian Rights Association through their investigative report, Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians,” Harlow said.“That report was published in 1924 as the result of an investigation that took place the year before in 1923. I was looking for more information about the IRA, and that’s when I came to discover they were headquartered in Philadelphia and that their complete collection was donated to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.”

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania originally told Harlow this collection was not available digitally. A request had to be put into the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and users had to pay a fee to access them in person, and Harlow did not know what specific documents she was looking for. 

Rachael Schuit, Senior Reporter at VNN and a Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin descendant, was able to go on trips to national archives to go through different documents.

“We were able to go on these trips because of a Data-Driven Reporting Project grant,” Schuit said. “Before that, Brittany had started to look into some of the history by collaborating with the Lucinda Hickory Research Institute. We were really interested in finding more about Native American history, especially as it relates to Oklahoma, and really the only way to do that was to physically go to some of these places, and we were given that opportunity. So the goal was to see what we’re going to find and what we could share with other people.”

With a grant given to VNN through the Data Driven Reporting Project, Harlow and a team were able to visit the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and some other national archives to go through the documents. Over the course of a day and a half, the team went through around 30 boxes of documents.

“It’s hard when you’re on these trips because you have to get approved ahead of time to go into the research room,” Schuit said. “We had to submit information ahead, they’re only open for so many hours, and we were getting pictures over as much as we could in terms of what we thought would be relevant later on, and we still probably couldn’t get to everything we wanted to.”

There were documents about the Poor Rich Indians, the probate scandal, different court and legal documents and hand-written letters.

“It was really just primary sources of history right in front of our eyes that weren’t being shared with a lot of people,” she said.

The group made scans of the documents while they were in Pennsylvania. After they returned to Oklahoma, Harlow wanted to put the documents online and inquired how much it would cost.

“They [Historical Society of Pennsylvania] said that it would be $6,000 to put just 300 items online, and they would have to go through and get approval from this company that they had apparently sold the exclusive digital rights to for a certain period of time,” she said.

Harlow later learned the collection had been digitized by Gale Publishing, who currently owns the exclusive digital rights to it. The Historical Society also told Harlow it would probably cost a few million dollars to digitize the collection after Gale’s exclusive rights term expired.

The next step was for Harlow to get in contact with Gale Publishing to license the collection. She learned Gale licenses the IRA collection to private institutions, but not companies or individuals. This made it impossible for Harlow and her team to access the records and put them on a website for public access.

“Because they came in and digitized it and it was part of their agreement, it’s their choice right now to license it out only to private institutions, which are colleges and other educational institutions, as well as library systems,” she said.

Gale Publishing told Harlow and VNN that it couldn’t license the rights directly to them, but could license to an educational institution. The next step was to find an institution that was able to license the collection. Harlow and her team contacted the Tulsa City-County Library. After a private tour, the library was interested in licensing the collection for public use, but didn’t have the funds to do so.

“And that’s where VNN came in and said ‘If you agree to license this collection forever for the Tulsa community and beyond, that we would fund it so that you could purchase the license,’ and that’s what we did,” Harlow said.

Harlow pushed to make sure the collection could be publicly accessed without users having to pay to do research. People wanting to access the documents would have to be college students or pay to access them, which would have limited accessibility further.

“I said, ‘We really need to make this publicly available at least here in Tulsa County and in Northeastern Oklahoma because these records are a huge swath of history that is relatively unknown,” Harlow said. It impacts so many people living here in Northeast Oklahoma, so at least people here need to be able to access this publicly and for free.’”

Teresa Runnels, the American Indian Resource Center Coordinator at Tulsa City-County Library and a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, received an email asking if there was interest in housing the collection. She was also on the committee to review the documents for the Tulsa City-County Library.

“We wanted to look at the content to see whether it would be a good fit for our customer base,” Runnels said. “Upon review, we determined that it would be.”

The Tulsa City-County library provides a service called “Book a Librarian” that walks users through how to access the database that houses the IRA collection if they need assistance. Within the library, the American Indian Resource Center provides a book circulation, and books within Tulsa City-County Library can be interchanged with the other branches. They have other databases, programming and outreach.

“A lot of the information in these databases is not shared in public education or in the school system,” she said. “Some of the documents contain outdated or insensitive language and thoughts about the American Indian that can be hard to read.”

In addition to Oklahoma and other tribes, there is information on the American Indian Movement, among other important things.

Tulsa City-County Library provides people who work, live or go to school in Tulsa County with free library cards. Users do not have to be Tulsa County residents to have a card to the library, but if users do not work, live or go to school inside county boundaries, they do have to pay a fee for a library card.

After 10 months, with multiple grants and funding partners, VNN was able to provide the Tulsa City-County library with the donation to purchase the records. These IRA documents will provide an insight into Native American history not only in the Tulsa area but tribes everywhere.

“Just knowing what’s in this collection, how relevant it is to challenges that are experienced on reservations in northeast Oklahoma today, and how relevant this history is, we just really felt passionately that this shouldn’t be privately held,” Harlow said. “That this should be available for free to anyone in our area to anyone that wanted to learn about it. We wanted to make sure as wide an audience as possible would experience these documents and look at them for themselves.”

Author

  • Collyn Combs

    Collyn Combs is a multimedia journalism student at Oklahoma State University. She is a member of the Osage Nation, and her family is from the Grayhorse district. Combs is from Ponca City, Okla., and attended school in Bartlesville, Okla., where she graduated in 2017. She served on the newspaper staff at Bartlesville High School from 2016-2017. She attended Northern Oklahoma College in Tonkawa after graduation and wrote for The Maverick newspaper from 2017-2020, and served as editor from 2018-2019. She currently lives in Stillwater, Okla., and is involved with O’Colly TV as the weather reporter, OSU Native American Student Association and is secretary for the Omega Phi Alpha National Service Sorority.

Get the Osage News by email!

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.

Collyn Combs
Collyn Combshttps://osagenews.org
Collyn Combs is a multimedia journalism student at Oklahoma State University. She is a member of the Osage Nation, and her family is from the Grayhorse district. Combs is from Ponca City, Okla., and attended school in Bartlesville, Okla., where she graduated in 2017. She served on the newspaper staff at Bartlesville High School from 2016-2017. She attended Northern Oklahoma College in Tonkawa after graduation and wrote for The Maverick newspaper from 2017-2020, and served as editor from 2018-2019. She currently lives in Stillwater, Okla., and is involved with O’Colly TV as the weather reporter, OSU Native American Student Association and is secretary for the Omega Phi Alpha National Service Sorority.
RELATED ARTICLES

In Case You Missed it...

Upcoming Events