MS 1 - Jeanne Smith Collection

Oglala Lakota College Archives

Manuscripts Collections

Finding Aid

JEANNE SMITH COLLECTION

[ca. 1800-1996]

Collection No: MS 1

Size: 4.60 linear feet Boxes: 11

OCLC No: Accession No: 1991.1

Acquisition: Jeanne Smith, 1991, 1993, 1994; Holly Boomer, 2004

Terms Governing Use: Open for research by appointment. Restrictions apply to photocopying certain files.

Processed By: Julie Lakota, 1993 and Archivist, 2005

Publication Rights: Copyright has not been assigned to the Oglala Lakota College Archives. All requests for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted on the Request To Publish form to the Archivist. Permission for publication is given on behalf of the Oglala Lakota College Archives as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained by the researcher.

Citation: [Identification of Item], Jeanne Smith Collection, MS 1, Oglala Lakota College Archives

Creator Sketch:

Jeanne Smith was a full-time Humanities instructor at Oglala Lakota College from 1971 to 1996, as well as a grant coordinator, OLC Self Study Coordinator, mentor and student. Jeanne came to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the late 1960s as a graduate student in the Vista Master's Candidate Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She worked with the Oglala Sioux Tribe's New Careers Program, as part of the University of Colorado's "University Year in Action" project. Her husband Dowell was also part of that project. When Oglala Lakota College (then Oglala Sioux Community College) was formally organized in March of 1971 and was able to garner some funding, Jeanne was hired as the first faculty for the college. She was an English instructor and was also very involved in the college's organizational structure development, as well as staff orientation and training. She was instrumental in the foundational validation of documentation necessary for accreditation. She was editor of the student creative arts publication, Youwanca. Jeanne Smith died suddenly in her office at the college in 1996.

Scope and Content Note:

Research materials—including manuscripts, publications, interviews on cassettes and transcriptions—gathered, indexed and donated by Jeanne Smith under a grant from the South Dakota Humanities Council. Groups 1 and 2 are the bulk of the Collection, and focus on family and community histories of the Pine Ridge Reservation, especially white men who married full-blood Lakota women. All subjects in the Collection are related to the Pine Ridge Reservation and the Lakota people, history, genealogy (white/Indians inter-marrying), and government. Almost all of the materials are copied from other archives located in the region: (1) The American Indian Research Project, University of South Dakota, Vermillion; (2) Ft. Laramie Archives, Ft. Laramie, Wyoming; (3) Museum of the Fur Trade, Chadron, Nebraska; (4) Ft Robinson Collection, Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln, Nebraska; (5) Mari Sandoz Collection, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; (6) JR Walker Papers, Colorado Historical Society; (7) Western History/Genealogy Department, Denver Public Library. An Index Guide was created for Groups 1 and 2 by Jeanne Smith, which often includes subject, names mentioned, and source of each file.

Index Guide Header Definitions:

File Title: the name or heading given to the file.

Subject: a brief summary of the contents of the file. When indexing tapes from the USD American Indian Research Project, the USD subject description was used.

Source: where the original information was found.

Names Mentioned: persons mentioned in the contents of the file. Note that the spellings of last names often differed, even when from the same source. The Index Guide reflects the spelling in the source indexed.

Secondary Information: notes not directly a part of the subject description.

Links:

Group 1 - Pine Ridge Reservation Family & Community Histories, 1991 (Box 1-4)

Group 2 - Pine Ridge Reservation Family & Community Histories, 1993 (Box 4-7,11)

Group 3 - Publications, 1953-1985 (Box 8)

Group 4 - Class Files & Student Research Papers, ca. 1970-1996 (Box 9-10)

Source Contact Information:

Please contact the following for copies of their corresponding files in this collection (see the “Source” header under each file title). If you do not see the source you need on this list, contact the archivist for further information.

American Indian Research Project, University of South Dakota

414 E. Clark St.

Vermillion, SD 57069

605-677-5209

iais@usd.edu

http://www.usd.edu/iais/oralhist.cfm

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries

PO Box 880410

Lincoln, NE 68588-0410

402-472-2531

http://www.unl.edu/libr/libs/spec/sandoz.html

Fort Laramie National Historical Research Library
Sandra_Lowry@partner.nps.gov
(OLC Archives has permission to provide copies of the FLNHRL files in the Jeanne Smith Collection. Contact the OLC Archivist.)

Nebraska State Historical Society

1500 R. Street, PO Box 82554

Lincoln, NE 68501

402-471-3270

lanshs@nebraskahistory.org

www.nebraskahistory.org

Museum of the Fur Trade

6321 Highway 20

Chadron, NE 69337

308-432-3843

museum@furtrade.org

www.furtrade.org/index.php