The Native American Authors archive maintained and hosted by ipl2 is a wonderful resource for anyone trying to find published work by Native Americans. ipl2 (a stylized name in all lower-case) calls itself “the first public library of and for the Internet community,” that aims to “shape and direct the evolving role of libraries in an increasingly digital world.” It is run by a conrortium of various schools of information technology and library sciences, with Drexel University in Pennsylvania being the managing partner. The amount of information in this resource is vast, and they provide several tools to sort and filter their database to find what you’re looking for.

The Native American Authors archive is found under ipl2’s “special collections” page, alongside such other topics as “US Presidents,” “Deaf and Hard of Hearing,” and “Digital Storytelling.” The archive is an excellent resource when searching for any Native American writings; it provides alphabetical sorting by author’s last name, titles, or tribes, and upon choosing an author the user is presented with a brief biography, a list of primary online sources on the author, and a full bibliography which includes titles, publication dates, and ISBNs (where applicable). Just as an example, searching for tribes beginning with ‘O’ you can easily find a list of Onondaga authors. If you click Oren Lyons’ name, you are presented with a list of his books and a link to his author biography page at Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions. This is a comprehensive and reliable collection of information that will be useful to anyone trying to study Native Americans at any level.

The thing that most struck me about this archive is the enormous number of published Native American authors. Studying US history, it can seem like Native American voices were largely silenced by the European settlers. This list of hundreds of published authors, many of them still living, proves otherwise. The work ipl2 did on this archive makes it clear that many native cultures are still alive, and provides a priceless resource to those who want to study them.