This site is an ongoing digitization project. The site contains the full text of over three hundred treaties concerning Native American Indian tribes. A table of contents organized by year, an index organized by tribe, and a keyword search engine are also included.
Type of Material:
Collection of primary source materials: legal documents.
Recommended Uses:
Use would depend on the instructor's application of the materials to the course content being studied.
Technical Requirements:
N/A
Identify Major Learning Goals:
N/A. The determination would be the instructor and what documents were selected for classroom use.
Target Student Population:
College.
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:
1. Background in Native American history. 2. Confort in working with legal documents. 3. Knowledge of use of primary sources and methods of historical interpretation.
Content Quality
Rating:
Strengths:
This site simply reproduces a compilation of primary documents. The site authors do not provide scholarly or contemporary commentary about the documents (other than a brief description of the source), do not make recommendations about how to use the documents, and do provide contextual information for the documents. That's not a criticism, but a statement. The authors are clear about their purpose and have done an excellent job of providing easy public access to this large volume of important material. An especially nice feature of the site, is that the authors provide both an image of and a fully searchable digitalized text version of each page of the original source.
Concerns:
None.
Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool
Rating:
Strengths:
The authors did not set out to design a teaching tool. Someone teaching Native American history, legal history, the 19th century US, or historical research could certainly make use of these documents in the classroom. The authors probably do not see teachers or students as their primary audience.
Concerns:
None.
Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty
Rating:
Strengths:
This is a well designed site. The layout is simple and easy-on-the-eyes. It also makes moving between pages and back to home easy. The search engine comes with comprehensive instructions and works quickly. It produces both a summary version of the results showing only the hits, as well as copies of the full documents with a button that directs you to the first hit in each one.
Concerns:
There are minor complaints. The authors should include a short explanation of how the "margin notes" bookmark works within the text version of the documents. It became necessary to compare the text version and the original page image to understand that the margin notes were linked to the first line that apeared on the screen after the button was hit. Using quotation marks with the search engine didn't produce the results expected. If the viewer types "Ghost Dance,
" you get results that inlcuded only one of those words or only one of a variation of the words. There is no clear indication what the orange circles mean that appear next to the search results. They may correlate to the frequency of hits. Real purpose a mystery!
Other Issues and Comments:
None.
Creative Commons:
Search by ISBN?
It looks like you have entered an ISBN number. Would you like to search using what you have
entered as an ISBN number?
Searching for Members?
You entered an email address. Would you like to search for members? Click Yes to continue. If no, materials will be displayed first. You can refine your search with the options on the left of the results page.
Searching for Members?
You entered an email address. Would you like to search for members? Click Yes to continue. If no, materials will be displayed first. You can refine your search with the options on the left of the results page.
