Foreword / James H. Billington -- Preface / Patrick Frazier -- General collections -- Gateways -- Pre-contact North American Indian life -- Fur trade -- European Colonial administration of Indian relations -- Special collections -- Early contact: discoverers and explorers -- Early Spanish contact -- French and English contact with East and South coasts of North America -- Spanish penetration of the Southwest -- French contacts in the Upper Midwest -- Contacts on the Northwest coast and California -- Captivity narratives -- Government documents: Franklin treaties -- Bible collection -- Indian portfolios: print and photographs -- Nineteenth-century exploration and travel in the American West: documentary, popular, and fictional accounts -- Twentieth-century decorative arts -- Manuscript division -- Gateways -- Early contacts with Europeans -- Missions and missionaries -- Evolution of Federal Indian policy and the Bureau of Indian Affairs -- The Law library of Congress -- Gateways -- Congress and Indian policy -- Warfare -- Indian languages and tribal names -- American Indian treaties -- Tribal and urban Indian governance today -- Prints and photographs division -- Indian delegations and government relations -- Federal government surveys and other expeditions -- Indian wars and confrontations -- The Frontier, villages, and reservation life -- Education -- Expositions, World's fairs, and Wild West shows -- Pictorial photographs -- Allegories, satires, stereotypes, and polemical representations.

Geography and map division -- Gateways -- Modern Indian activism and self-determination -- Reservations, agents, and allotments -- Non-Indian images of North American Indians -- Motion picture, broadcasting and recorded sound division -- Gateways -- Indian removal across the country -- American Indian land and other claims -- Pre-contact Indian economies and technology -- Indian policy reform ("the Indian new deal"); and the Termination Era -- Indian art, craft, and design today -- Music division and recorded sound reference centeer of motion picture, broadcasting and recorded sound division -- Frances Densmore collection -- Natalie Curtis Burlin collection -- American folklife center -- Collections from the American Philosophical Society library -- The Laura Bolton collections -- Collections from the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) -- Indians for Indians hour collections -- Collections from the Peabody Museum of Harvard University -- The Willard Rhodes collections -- The Helen Heffron Roberts collections -- Collections from the Mary C. Wheelwright Museum -- Zuni storytelling collection -- Gateways -- Songs and dances -- Traditional Indian spirituality.