This collection of twelve items includes dictionaries, lexicons, grammars, and miscellaneous missionary materials in Blackfoot, Slave, Cree, Montagnais, Tlingit, and Hare (Kawchotinne). Written by various authors.

This collection consists of two manuscripts volumes containing vocabularies from numerous Indigenous languages primarily from what is now Washington, Idaho, Oregon, British Columbia, and Alaska, as well as some from the Great Lakes and central Canada, obtained by dictation from native speakers and traders of the Hudson's Bay Company.

This item contains Jefferson's comparative vocabulary, based on his collection of vocabularies taken on printed forms; a second comparative vocabulary; and John Sibley's vocabulary of the Caddo language. This document was damaged in transit from the White House to Monticello in 1809 (see letters of Jefferson to Peter S. Du Ponceau, November 7, 1817, and April 26, 1816.)

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.