Native American & Indigenous Studies (NAIS)

Search Terms/Keywords

You can find books by searching by keyword, keeping in mind that the words people use to talk about relevant topics will vary greatly depending on their group identity, academic training, language, context and perspective! Using one simple example, Native American, American Indian, First Nations, Indigenous and/or more specific identities like Navajo or Diné -- all are used in different contexts by different people. Indigenous scholarship crosses international borders and languages. Words carry meaning and reflect both power dynamics and the identities of those creating and organizing information.

Subject Headings*

Pro tip: Find books by subject headings in our catalog, OneSearch! Subject headings are specific words or phrases used to find and organize books and articles by topic. If you find one relevant book in the catalog, check its subject headings and select one to find other books that have been tagged with the same subject heading! 

Here are some examples of subject headings that you can use to find materials about Native Americans in the library's catalog.

• Indians of Nort America--California
• Native Americans
• Indians of North America
• Native peoples
• Indigenous peoples

Search Tips & Strategies

• Vary your search terms and use Boolean operators to expand or limit your search results
  • The term Indigenous is broadly used to describe many peoples worldwide.
  • Use terms such as First Nations, Métis, Inuit or specific names of Nations to refine your search results.
• Be aware of modern terminology
  • Outdated terms will produce results from older sources. Terms like "Indian" are rarely used in literature today outside of certain historical or legal contexts, such as The Indian Act. Many Nations use authentic names that differ from names created by colonists (example: Nlaka'pamux rather than Thompson River Salish). Use self-descriptive terms to find recent work by and/or about communities.
• Use terms people use to describe themselves
  • There may be multiple commonly used terms to refer to the same Nation/Band/people (ex: Cree and Néhiyaw). Search both terms individually or use Boolean searching constructions to find results containing either terms (Cree OR Néhiyaw).
• Search relevant databases available through the library
• Research authors
  • Indigenous authors may self-identify in their bio or on their website. *Note while researching: be cautious of assumptions about a person's identity based on appearance or stereotypical expectations; appearance is not a reliable indicator of one's racial, ethnic, cultural, or national background.

*Racism in Subject Terms

The way information is organized often reflects the prejudices of those that create and work within the system. The Library of Congress, the organization that develops subject headings used by many academic libraries, has used many outdated and offensive terms to refer to groups of people. Some have been updated, while others remain.

For example, the Library of Congress changed Chippewa Indians to Ojibwe Indians in order to use this tribe’s self-preferred name. However, there is still much work to be done in this area. Calls to change subject headings to more accurately represent the Native American experience have not yet been made e.g. from relocation to removal. --See "Omissions and Distortion Abound in Libraries, Too" (4 Feb. 2019) by Sanford Berman 

Source:

University of California Merced. (2022, August 5). Native American & Indigenous Communities: Search Terms & Subject Headings. Native American & Indigenous Communities. Retrieved August 12, 2022, from https://libguides.ucmerced.edu/native-american-indigenous/search-terms

The" Search Tips & Strategies" content on this page was reused from a Research Guide entitled "Indigenous Education" By NorQuest College Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. We thank them for sharing these with us so that we may learn from them.