Cornell Gains Historic Native American Collection
-- Library Journal, 6/22/2004
After 15 years of legal wrangling involving one of the largest, most prestigious Native American collections in the world, the collection will go to the Cornell University Library. Cornell will pay the Huntington Free Library $2.5 million to house the precious collection, in a deal that not only will preserve and make the collection available to users, but also ends the litigation that has hamstrung the Huntington library's finances. The collection contains more than 40,000 volumes on the archaeology, ethnology and history of the native peoples of the Americas from the colonial period to the present. At Cornell, the collection will be fully cataloged, with online records made available in national and international bibliographic databases. Over the coming years, Cornell librarians also plans to digitize and make available on the web some 1,300 rare books and monographs as well as approximately 100,000 pages of the Huntington's manuscript holdings. The collection was appraised at $8.3 million in 2001.
The saga surrounding the collection began in 1930, when the Huntington, a private, free library in Bronx, NY, received the Native American collection from the Museum of the American Indian, then located in New York City. In 1990, however, the American Indian museum was absorbed by the National Museum of the American Indian, part of the Smithsonian Institution, which ultimately filed suit to recover the collection held at the Huntington. Although the Huntington won all key New York and federal court decisions in its battle to keep the collection, Huntington President Edward Morgan said the costly litigation nearly ruined it financially. The deal with Cornell, Morgan said, will allow it to recover its finances, while also ensuring the proper preservation and availability of the collection. Highlights of the collection include early printed books on travel and exploration with accounts of encounters with native peoples, original drawings of American Indians by the artist George Catlin, and a 1765 original manuscript peace treaty between the Delaware Nation and Britain's superintendent of Indian affairs.
