American Indian Law: Catalogs & Indexes

A periodical index can be an efficient way to identify scholarly articles not generally available on the web, but also to avoid the familiar glut of irrelevant hits retrieved via indiscriminate web search engines. In addition to searching for relevant terms in titles, keywords, abstracts, subjects, etc., a useful strategy is to identify relevant subject headings and to focus your search on articles to which they have been assigned.

Index to Legal Periodicals & Books and Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective: 1918-1981 (UCB only).
Index to Legal Periodicals & Books indexes nearly 300 journals and the contents of 1,400 books per year, as far back as 1994. The Retrospective index includes over 500 journals. Both include English language international sources, but neither includes full-text documents.

Use the Thesaurus to identify relevant terms. For example, a search in the Thesaurus for native americans identifies Indians as the term to use when searching these indexes, as well as narrower terms (e.g., Blackfoot Nation). A subsequent search for indians reveals related subject terms (e.g., Indians/Californiaand the databases (i.e., Periodicals & Books or Retrospective) in which they occur.

Use the Browse function to view an alphabetical list of subjects.

Search by keyword in the Basic Search, or narrow your search to the Subject(s) or other fields using Advanced Search. For example:

• Basic Search: indians and cultural rights
  The results include index records in which your terms appear in the title and subject fields.
• Advanced Search: indians [Subject(s)] and allotment [All-Smart Search]
  Results include records in which indians appears in the subject fields and allotment appears in any other field.

LegalTrac (UCB only).
LegalTrac includes "indexing [from 1980] for approximately 1,300 titles: major law reviews, legal newspapers, law specialty publications, bar association journals and international legal journals," as well as "law-related articles from more than 1,000 additional business and general interest titles." Full-text is available for only approximately 110 of the journals.

Search by subject or keyword. For example:

• Subject: native americans
  The result allows you to continue to narrow your search using an extensive list of subdivided subjects (e.g., Native Americans - laws, regulations and rules) or a list of related terms (e.g., Algonquians).
• Keyword: indian gaming regulatory act (popular name of a statute); oliphant and suquamish (case name); or indian* and religion (legal issues)

Ethnic NewsWatch (UCB only).
Ethnic NewsWatch describes itself as "an interdisciplinary, bilingual (English and Spanish) and comprehensive full text database of the newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press." Among its indexed titles relating to native peoples, for example, are Native American Times and the American Indian Quarterly (available via Project Muse (UCB only) and JSTOR (UCB only)). Although these are not primarily legal journals, Ethnic NewsWatch may nevertheless be useful for finding news and scholarly articles from other disciplines.