Native American Collection Available Online

Child's dress donated to the Society by Gertrude Romaine

With funding from a Save America’s Treasures grant, a private donor, and the Nebraska State Historical Society Foundation, the museum collections department and conservation division of the Society recently completed a two-year project to improve the documentation and storage conditions of our collection of over 2,400 Native American artifacts.

Crow saddle donated to the Society by Charles H. Dietrich

This project had many positive outcomes:  improved storage conditions to ensure the preservation of these important artifacts, increased information about the collection in our database to assist researchers and exhibit curators, and increased access to the collection through scholarship and our online database. 

In fact, scholarship began when one of the technicians hired to work on the project wrote a wonderful article about the D.C. “Omaha Charley” Bristol collection that was published in the Winter 2009 issue of the Society’s magazine Nebraska History (see an excerpt here).

Pawnee headdress from the D. C. "Omaha Charlie" Bristol Collection.

We’ve also made almost the entire collection available to the public through our online collections database.   I encourage you to try it out as it’s easy to use.  Simply type a specific term into the search box (such as Pawnee, moccasin, headdress, etc.) to see more targeted results or, for a general browse of the collection, just enter “Native American.”

Deb Arenz, Senior Museum Curator