Tribal treasures

The Sequoyah National Research Center - the largest collection of American Indian expression in the world - started life in 1983 in the back of a truck.

Daniel Littlefield and Jim Parins, English professors at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, were researching American Indian publishing. They traveled to the University of Arizona in Tuscon, where a museum had a collection of tribal newspapers.

A librarian said she’d been instructed to throw away the newspapers.

The UALR professors asked: May we have them?

Yes, the librarian said. Her staff carried the newspapers out of the library and filled up Littlefield’s Ford Courier pickup.

On the drive back, Littlefield and Parins “decided we’d call ourselves an archive,” Littlefield said at UALR’s Sequoyah Center, which now occupies 7,200 square feet in University Plaza, a strip mall on Asher Avenue.

Expression means most anything, Littlefield said - newspapers, books, audio and visual recordings and works of art. “Largest” is self-designated, “but we don’t know of anything equal, and no one has challenged that.”

Their motivation?

“As researchers and writers, we found that Native American records were limited, and a major complaint of Native Americans is that their history is written by others.”

From Littlefield’s pickup the newspapers went into his 10-foot-by-10-foot office in Stabler Hall.

“You could walk in and back out, or you could back in and walk out,” Littlefield said.

When an office became vacant, the collection went in there. In the early 1990s, when an academic reorganization split the English department, “I took over eight 10-by-10 offices.”

Littlefield, now the director of the Sequoyah Center, said he and Parins agreed they’d keep collecting “until someone higher than the dean told us to stop, and then we would give it to a real university.”

Instead, the collection went into the campus library, and in2008 to what once was Schuster’s furniture. The center celebrated its 30th anniversary on Nov. 12, 2013. Parins died shortly afterward.

UALR Chancellor Joel Anderson credited the center’s success to Littlefield and Parins, and also Bob Sanderson, a sociology professor who is an associate director.

“Dan can really claim paternity for the center,” Anderson said. “He’s the one people were aware of and to whom people offered their collections.”

“It’s good for a university to have the use of these materials,” he added, “and it’s a rare resource for scholars.”

Jack Baker of Oklahoma City, a member of the Cherokee Nation Tribal Council, appreciates the value of the collected history.

“One of their major resources is the tribal newspapers,” he said, “including those going back to the 1880s. If not the actual copies, then the digitized copies. As far as the Cherokee Nation is concerned, they’ve done a great job of digitizing and indexing many of them.”

“The Indian nations,” Baker said, “are appreciative of what Dan Littlefield and Jim Parins have done.”

Sequoyah has become a clearinghouse for literary research materials on American Indians, said Bill Welge, director of the American Indian Cultural Office at the Oklahoma Historical Society.

“It fills a niche the founders saw for writers, whether in newspapers or writers of literature, fiction or nonfiction. There was no repository for that kind of material, and I applaud the founders for going out and collecting it from throughout the country,” Welge said.

In 1985, Parins and Littlefield joined the Native American Journalists Association.

Now, he said of publishers, “they don’t miss a lick. Every time they get an edition they send it to us.” The center gets up to 150 publications a month, he said.

A prime example of the collection is a copy of the first issue of Indian Home and Farm, published on March 17, 1910, in Muskogee, Okla., whose flag says it’s “A Newspaper They Can All Read.” All meant Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek and English, the four languages in which the newspaper was printed.

Littlefield and Parins are authors of a three-volume set, American Indian and Alaska Native Newspapers and Periodicals, 1826-1924, published in 1984 and 1985.

Some tribes now have their own book presses, Littlefield said, including the Choctaws and the Chickasaws. “My library collection will keep growing because we make an effort to collect all the books we can.”

Individuals donate, as well, Littlefield said. John Moncravie of Fayetteville, a retired Air Force veteran and truck driver, died last May. Moncravie, an Osage, “wanted to make us a center for the study of Osage art, history and culture.” Moncravie donated 150 pieces of art and other materials.

On Thursday, the Frazier Trust Collection of Cherokee Nation materials was opened to researchers. The collection of papers, Littlefield said, came from James and Sallie Frazier of Cushing, Okla., and date from 1811 to 2011. The collection covers a wide range of topics, Littlefield said, including education, business, and land allotment. Plus, he said, 100 love letters “that give good insight into what young people in the Cherokee Nation were doing in the late years of the 19th and early years of the 20th century.”

A large part of the art collection was donated in 2004 by J.W. Wiggins, a retired UALR professor of chemistry. The art is primarily of American Indians in Oklahoma north through the Great Plains, into the Canadian provinces and to the Arctic.

LIFE CHANGED

Wiggins came to UALR in 1969 to teach chemistry and retired in 2002 as dean of the College of Science and Mathematics.

“He was always after me to go to the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee,” Wiggins said of Littlefield. Coming back from a trip to the West in 1974, Wiggins did.

“I walked in, I was comfortable and at ease, and I liked the art. My life hasn’t been the same since.”

Wiggins collected - and collected, and collected - American Indian artworks, mostly paintings but also pottery. Twenty-two pieces of pottery from his collection are currently on display at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville. Numerous pieces are now on display at the Sequoyah Center in an exhibit titled “Art From Above the Arctic Circle.”

A scientist to the core, Wiggins kept a computer database of his collection. He could press a button he said, and know how much he’d spent. He pressed that button one day in 1978.

“I never punched it again,” he said. “I decided if I was going to invest that much money I better know what I was doing.”

He learned as much as he could and kept collecting.

“What makes a good piece or a bad piece is the same, no matter the artist or the culture,” he said.

Encouraged by Al Allen, an artist and faculty member, Wiggins focused his collection on works from American Indians in Oklahoma, the Plains states, Canada and the Arctic.

The collection includes little art from Arkansas, he said, because there simply isn’t much, but he tries to buy those pieces whenever possible.

The collection grew to fill his home.

“I had paintings floor to ceiling, with a half-inch between. They even covered the windows. I had them stacked in one room.”

Eventually, Wiggins said, “you wonder what will happen to it. I wanted it to stay together.”

The answer: “You donate it.”

He went shopping for the right museum in Oklahoma, but found that the contemporary nature of his collection equated to little interest.

“Museums like art that’s been validated by the art historians,” Wiggins said. “These artists aren’t dead. They haven’t been validated by the powers that be.”

Anderson told Wiggins in the 1990s that it would be wonderful if the Sequoyah Center’s literary works and Wiggins’ artworks could be together.The collection was donated in 2004.

Many of the paintings hang at Sequoyah. Much of the rest of the roughly 2,700-piece collection is in storage there.

The storage area has several mini-galleries where paintings are grouped by artist. Dennis Belindo, a Kiowa of Oklahoma, represents Wiggins’ biggest collection - about 75 works.

Another artist prominently displayed - about 65 pieces - is Luke Anguhadluq of Baker Lake, a place on the west side of Hudson Bay in Canada. The artist “came off the tundra” in 1970 at the age of 70, Wiggins said, and painted works of “daily life. How things actually happened.”

Not all of Wiggins’ collected works are here. Fifteen are at the chancellor’s home, he said. Wiggins’ own home still has many, from which he finds contentment.

“I’m never alone. Anywhere I sit in my house I’m surrounded by friends.”

DEDICATED BUILDING

Littlefield hopes someday the center will have a dedicated building on campus, a place that can better preserve the publications, artifacts and artworks.

“In storage, we need about 30,000 (square feet) if we are to anticipate not outgrowing it for a decade. We could make space last longer if we go to compact shelving - that is for archives and art. We are going to have to start stacking stuff in boxes in the not-distant future at the rate we are growing.”

Is there a place on campus for such a thing?

“Our long-term planning certainly includes as one of the needs a considerably larger and better facility for the Sequoyah National Research Center,” Anderson said. “Some serious thinking has been done, and some preliminary planning. As to the where, the assumption is the south end of campus, in proximity to the University Plaza, more to the east side, in proximity to the Trail of Tears Park, which was a watering hole on the Trail of Tears at Coleman Creek.”

But, he said, “there are no blueprints in the closet to haul out and break ground with.”

“When is the question that really can’t be answered at this point because it depends on funding. We’ve given people the opportunity to step up and make something like that happen. Those people are few and far between and we’ve not found them yet.”

“It’s something that stays on the agenda, and one of these days, maybe later rather than sooner, there will be an opportunity and we will proceed,” Anderson said.

“I know they’ll fill it because they’ve built a reputation with writers who will deposit their personal records there,” Welge of the Oklahoma Historical Society said.

“They’ve very much become a force to be reckoned with.”