The Wyandot Heritage Digital Archive (WHDA) is a collaborative documentary effort to create an online repository of resources connected to Wyandot history, culture, and language.  These documents include census records, correspondence, diaries, drawings, journals, ledger books, legal documents, maps, material culture, paintings, photographs, postal history, treaties, and tribal rolls. The WHDA seeks to digitally reunify their archival record for the benefit of the Wyandot(te) people. 

Our main objective is to assemble digital versions of primary historical sources associated with the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century Wyandot experience in their homelands of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Kansas and Oklahoma collected from archives, libraries, museums, historical societies, and private collections across the United States and elsewhere.

The WHDA is currently an open work in progress. While we encourage you to explore and learn, please know that we are actively cleaning our data and continuing to develop standards that best represent the Wyandotte Nation. We appreciate your patience as we undertake this multi-year project. 

A Note on Terminology

The presence of Europeans in what is now the United States and Canada generated centuries of displacement and dispossession. As a result, the Wyandot(te) today emcompass four distinct political nations. Wyandotte Nation, headquartered in Wyandotte, Oklahoma, is the only federally-recognized nation in the United States. The Wyandotte are one of four members of the Wendat Confederacy, organized in 1999 as a coalition of contemporary tribal entities related to the original Wendat Nation. The confederacy include the Wyandotte Nation (Oklahoma), the Wyandot Nation of Kansas, the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation (Michigan), and the Huron Wendat of Wendake (Ontario). After generations of disunity, the confederacy’s aim is to provide mutual aid "so that the Wendat people may endure and flourish" for countless more generations.

Within the WHDA, we refer to the "Wyandot" when we write about the historic peoples, the "Wyandotte" when we write about the federally-recognized nation in Oklahoma, Wyandot Nation of Kansas and Wyandot of Anderdon Nation respectively, and Wyandot(te) when we refer to all of the nations.