Audio recordings, photographs, and born-digital manuscripts documenting primarily Ojibwe and Cree communities and individuals in Manitoba, Ontario, and Saskatchewan.

The first section (Series I) of this recording collection consists of 13 episodes of the radio program "Red Man in Michigan," broadcast on WUOM radio in Ann Arbor, Michigan. These programs use extensive clips from field recordings made by Gertrude Prokosch Kurath, and cover a wide range of historical and contemporary topics directed to a general non-Native audience. Series II consists of tapes including Ottawa language hymns from a series of programs titled "Comparisons of Chippewa Revival Hymns, Michigan and Ontario, 1953-1962"; interviews on the organization of United Church, on the organization of Camp Meetings, on missionary experiences, especially at Perry Island and Moose Point, Ontario; recordings of powwows at Ann Arbor, Lansing, and Hastings, including some Kiowa performances by John Bosin; an interview with Jim Eagle Shaffer; and an interview with Anna Fulton, Douglas Fulton, and Bruce Fulton on socio-economic conditions and racial discrimination against Native people in Michigan.

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.