Born in Königsberg, Prussia, in 1714, the Moravian missionary Johann Jacob Schmick studied theology as a young man and became acquainted with the teachings of the United Brethren as early as 1742, taking his first communion six years later. He was called to become a missionary in 1751, and was appointed to the Indian congregation at Gnadenhutten, Pa., ministering primarily to a congregation of Mahican converts who had settled there. Schmick taught reading and writing, and was particularly known for teaching singing and introducing the spinet and other instruments to the Indians. He continued in his missionary work almost to the time of his death in 1778. Schmick's Miscellanea linguae nationis Indicae Mahikan consists of two volumes (322pp.) of manuscript vocabulary and notes on the Mahican language recorded between about 1753 and 1767. It consists of words and phrases in Mahican, written phonologically, and translated into their German equivalents. The volumes have been edited, translated, and published by Carl Masthay as Schmick's Mahican Dictionary APS Memoir 197 (1991).

Theodor Schultz was a Moravian missionary in British Guiana at the turn of the nineteenth century. The Lokono ("Arawak") language manuscripts sent to the APS by him include both a grammatical treatise (organized upon the Latin model) ("Grammaticalische Sätze von der Aruwakkischen Sprache") and an extensive Lokono-German dictionary ("Aruwakkisch deutsches Wörterbuch, vermehrt 1803").

The Mary Rosamond Haas papers are extensive, including correspondence, research notes, field notes, texts, lexical slip files, audio recordings, photographs, reprints and more, covering more than 100 languages of North America and Southeast Asia. Of particular value are notes and audio recordings from fieldwork from the 1930s on Ditidaht, Tunica, Natchez and Muscogee, work toward pedagogical materials for Thai, and groundbreaking comparative studies of several language families of North America.

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.