The collection consists of linguistic elicitations of different aspects of Shawnee grammar and vocabulary, and conversation, anecdotes, discussion, and personal narratives relating to Shawnee customs and history. The linguistic material includes elicitation of passive, imperative, hortative verbs, and other verb forrms, vocabulary for times of the day and year, weather, gender and age, color terms, and miscellaneous adjectives and full sentences. The other material includes a narratives given in Shawnee on on traditional roles of men and women and the use of eagle feathers in doctoring, and English anecdotes and conversation relating to topics such as: different types of dances, the Shawnee Indian Agency, economic and agricultural conditions during the Depression, memories of farming and hunting during childhood, traditional medicine, the keeping of fire, how people and tribes were created and how they learned to make fire, the treatment of women in Shawnee society, little people, the passing down of knowledge through elders, doctoring, the use of tobacco and peyote, and personal stories. Recorded in Oklahoma in 1994.

For many years referred to as the "Franz Boas Collection of American Indian Linguistics," this collection consists of a large body of linguistic and ethnographic material gathered together by Boas and many of his colleagues and students primarily from the 1890s to the 1940s. It contains the bulk of Boas's own fieldwork material, with the main exception of most of his Inuit and earliest Northwest Coast fieldwork. It contains the majority of the work sponsored by American Council of Learned Societies Committee on Native American Languages, which was directed by Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber, and other academic linguists from 1927-1937. The collection, however, also contains related kinds of fieldwork and derived secondary materials created outside the auspices of this Committee, both earlier and later. The first deposit of the material arrivied in 1945. Subsequently, additional related materials were donated and added, as noted in the listings. Additionally, the documentary materials produced by some of the early projects (1945 to circa 1955) of the APS Phillips Fund for Native American Research were added to this collection. The collection has grown to over 80 linear feet of material representing at least 166 languages and dialects from the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The formats range from field notes and ethnographic texts to slip files, vocabularies, lexica, and grammars, and dozens of linguists and Native consultants are represented.

Audio recordings, primarily linguistic field recordings of Native American languges, removed from the James M. Crawford papers. The bulk of the recordings are in three areas: Alabama songs, stories, and fiddle music; Cocopa folklore, autobiographical stories, songs, and elicited words and sentences; Yuchi autobiographical stories, conversations, and elicitied word lists. Other material includes: Cherokee conversations; Chickasaw word and phrases lists; readings from a Chontal-Spanish dictionary; a Diegueño text; words lists and discussion regarding the Mobilian trade language (Yama); intermixed Mobilian, Choctaw, and Koasati word lists; Mohave songs, with explanations; a Navajo elicitation session, with interview and conversation; elicited Shoshoni expressions; Tolowa songs, Yavapai word lists and texts; and Yuki words and expressions. The small amount of non-Native American material in the collection generally consists of unidentified conversations, readings of English and Russian texts, and recordings of baby talk.