Great Lakes-Ohio Valley Ethnohistory Collection

GLOVE Collection

The Great Lakes-Ohio Valley Ethnohistory Collection (GLOVE) is a unique assemblage of primary and secondary resources pertaining to the Native American occupancy of the region. These items were assembled in the 1950s by Indiana University professor, Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin and her eight-person research team to support the Great Lakes-Ohio Valley Ethnohistory Project. This U.S. Department of Justice funded research activity was responsible for the preparation of in-depth reports concerning American Indian land use and tenure. These reports were intended to be used in the government's defense against cases involving alleged treaty inequities and which were brought before the Indian Claims Commission, a body and a process authorized by federal legislation signed into law on August 13, 1946.

These materials cover history and land use of tribes and groups in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region from the 1600s until the late 1900s, and record the findings of the Indian Claims Commission.

Hear an overview!

What's the GLOVE?

The IUMAA Librarian quickly discusses the GLOVE in this 10-minute Coffee & Curators talk presented fall 2021:

YouTube video

Importance

The GLOVE is IUMAA Reading Room's most used collection. The collection is valuable for its original purpose of providing evidence for legal disputes of land and treaty violations; however, it is also an incredible resource for anyone researching American Indian or colonial history topics. The narrow focus on American Indian land use and occupancy may seem of limited value to some researchers, but many topics are inadvertently covered by these gathered documents.

"This collection...

is unique in scope, spanning over three hundred years of Native-Euroamerican relations, and it is one of the most comprehensive collections of ethnohistoric data in existence for Indian groups” and “the depth and breadth of the information contained in it is staggering, and it is one of the single most important achievements of historical research on early America…”

John M. Glen, Alan F. January, Suzanne K. Justice, Glenn L. McMullen, and Saundra Taylor, “Indiana Archives: Indiana before Statehood,” Indiana Magazine of History XCIX, no. 3 (2003): 263-279.

For instance, many of the documents in the Tribal History Documents series of the GLOVE might only consist of 3 pages of a 200 page book or 1 page from a 5 page letter discussing travel, people, plants, and animals; the way that the collection was originally assembled provides a road map for studying Native history. Imaginative digital strategies are allowing us to highlight the full value of the information contained in the complex relationships within the collection by connecting our partial document to its original source. Researchers can find an online Zotero bibliography digitally creating a library of resources by tribe. This process has only begun and will be continuing through the rest of the series.

Access

GLOVE finding aid

on Archives Online

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Content

Scope

This collection contains 469 linear feet of material separated into 9 series, found on the finding aid linked above. Documents reproduced for the GLOVE cover the time period 1540-1957.

Tribal Groups

The Native Tribal groups represented include:

Chippewa (Ojibwa)
Delaware
Huron (Wyandot)
Illinois
Kickapoo
Mascouten
Menomini
Miami
Ohio Valley Iroquois
Ottawa
Potawatomi
Sac
Shawnee
Sioux (Santee Dakota)
Winnebago

Geographic Area

The geographic area investigated by the GLOVE project include in whole or in part the present states of:

Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Michigan
Minnesota
Ohio
Pennsylvania
New York
North Dakota
Wisconsin

Tribal History Document Series

The Tribal History Document Series (THDS) of the Great Lakes-Ohio Valley Ethnohistory collection is the most used series of documents. It is made up of 256 archival boxes that contain an estimated 157,000 pages.This series brings together documentary evidence from a variety of sources scattered across the world.

When the GLOVE researchers found documents relating how land in the Midwest was used, they translated, photocopied, typed, or otherwise transcribed the relevant passage, which may only be 2 pages from a 25 page chapter, or a paragraph from a diary, noted the original source, and brought a physical copy back to be organized at IU. The documents were arranged into tribal groups and then chronologically within that tribe; we identify this material as the Tribal History Document Series.

Example of THDS document with description. (Shawnee 8012-01-009)

Scanned item 8012-01-009: O'Callaghan, E.B., Berthold Fernos, and John Romeyn Brodhead. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York: Procured in Holland, England, and France, Vol. VIII, pp. 534-542.

Pictured are a few example of what a researcher might find in this series. You'll see the citation is at the top of the page. The researcher who collected the document typed the paragraphs at the bottom. At the top-right you’ll see a key denoting that this passage relates to more than one tribe, so a copy of this document will be found in each of the relevant tribe’s boxes within the THDS. Sometimes researchers underlined, crossed-out, or made some other marginalia that can be different between copies, though. The conditions of the pages vary.

Think of this series as research notes gathered by the GLOVE project team. These materials were then summarized by those researchers into Ethnohistorical Reports that were later submitted in the Department of Justice in the Indian Claims Commission legal cases.

In collaboration with several federally recognized tribes, we are hard at work digitizing this series of materials so researchers can access the pages from a distance.

GLOVE Maps

Similar to the Tribal History Document Series, the GLOVE researchers also duplicated and collected 193 maps.

A portion of this series has been digitized. It is available on Image Collections Online.

Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology