The anthropologist Oswald Werner was a member of the faculty at Northwestern University from 1963 until his retirement in 1998. A student of Navajo language and culture, he had a particular interest in Navajo medicine and science. The Werner Collection consists of two of Oswald Werner's early works on Navajo language and culture: his dissertation, "A typological comparison of four trader Navaho speakers" (Indiana University, 1963) and a paper "The Navaho ethnomedical domain: prolegomena to a componential semantic analysis" (1964).

The linguist Walter Dyk (1899-1972) began his career as a graduate student under Edward Sapir studying the Wishram language. Following his MA thesis "Verb types in Wishram" (Chicago, 1931) and dissertation "A Grammar of Wishram" (Yale, 1933), Dyk turned to the study of Navajo language and culture, publishing his best known works, "autobiographies" of two of his consultants, Left Handed (1938) and Old Mexican (1948). The Dyk Collection consists of copies of Dyk's MA thesis and dissertation, some fields notes and related publications on Wishram, and commentary by Mary Haas, C. F. Voegelin, and Dell Hymes (who assembled the collection). Among the more interesting items are a particularly long and informative letter from Sapir commenting on Dyk's dissertation, and a series of letters between Pete McGuff and Sapir, written while the former was doing fieldwork on Wasco at Fort Simcoe, Washington, 1906-1908.