Native American Names

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This presentation was inspired by the archival processing of the Katherine A. Spilde Papers on Native American Gaming. Dr. Spilde is an anthropologist specializing in the economic impacts of on- and off-reservation gambling, and a majority of the collection focuses on Native American gaming following the passage of the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. However, once the team began processing the collection, they discovered that the Spilde Papers had been compiled without reference to the naming conventions of the individual Native American nations, bands, and tribes. It was apparent that in almost every case, the Native American nations had been referred to by names assigned to them by the US Federal Government, including the Bureau of Indian Affairs and other agencies. As the team began describing the materials, they encountered a dilemma: should they maintain the names assigned to these nations by federal agencies and others, which are more commonly accepted or recognized names, and most of which are included in the Library of Congress Authorities and Vocabularies; or should they use the names the individual nations use for themselves, which are often non-English language and not well known to the general public? The solution was to include both versions of the names. By preferencing the Native American language names they respectfully represented Indigenous peoples in the archival descriptions. By also including the names by which the Indigenous peoples are more commonly known, they facilitated discovery of the materials. Subsequently, they used the research done during processing of the Spilde Papers to inform how they processed Native American materials in the other collections that were part of this grant-funded project.

UNLV's Native American Names Cross Reference spreadsheet was researched and compiled by the America's Great Gamble project team at the Special Collections & Archives of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas University Libraries. The spreadsheet brings together the autonyms, Federal Register names, and Library of Congress Name Authority File records for over 180 Native American nations and communities. The information was first compiled and used to create more accurate and robust descriptions for archival materials in the Katherine A. Spilde Papers on Native American Gaming and later for other Native American materials housed in UNLV Special Collections and Archives. Furthermore, archivists identified the names of Indigenous peoples that are most frequently represented in UNLV Libraries' archival collections and used the Native American Names Cross Reference to create preferred names and alternate names for local authority records.