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Getting Started

We hope you will begin by searching our Native American Archives, where we have compiled a shared pool of Native American historical and cultural information from open source public access information. We hope through this you will see that this is not a portal of Native American websites, but rather it is a database of specially selected information we hope will be useful, made accessible in an intelligent way not available elsewhere.

Below are some examples of special kinds of searches you can do with this custom search application. Besides the usual key word searches, there are many other things that can be done.

When the Concept Search (Thesaurus) option is turned on, concept searching is enabled. Each keyword you enter will also find a list of associated concepts from an English language thesaurus of over 250,000 word associations.

In addition, a Native Language Thesaurus of many indigenous Native Language words and terms has been constructed, so that with the Concept Search (Thesaurus) box checked on, you can enter a query using Seminole, Creek, Muskogee, Cherokee, Apache, Lakota, Sioux, Yurok, and other Native Languages from this and other regions. See our reference page for an example of some of the words this search engine knows about.

You can also designate how close or how far you want the search terms to be in the text, you can look for English text representing numeric values, you can find things you don't know how to spell, and you can look for special patterns. Or you can restrict the search to exactly what you want by turning off the Concept Search (Thesaurus) option. All these types of searches are explained in our Query Language Tutorial.

Try these sample queries in the "Find" box of the Native American Archive Search to get started. See our Query Language Tutorial for further clarification.

Examples:
• kweschin ("strawberry" in Yurok)
• yok-che ("turtle" in Miccosukee)
• re eccv ("bullet" and "gun" close in the text)
• tribal ceremonies (English word concept search)
• river basin (concept search)
• ~river ~basin (keywords only - use ~ or turn off Thesaurus)
• Shawnee ~religious practice (words clustered inside of a paragraph)
• Shawnee ~religious practice w/all (words anywhere in the document)
• "Native American" (phrase only)
• Nauset*Cod (wildcards in text)
• cetto #>5<11 ("snake" with some number between 5 and 11)
• %70ogibwey canoe (variable spellings up to a 70% match, finding canoe with "Ojibwe")
• /\digit{4} (special pattern for 4 digits, finding years)

If you have a specific question you don't find the answer to in the references above, please email us and we'll try to get you an answer as soon as possible!