Search Help

How does this work?
There are many ways to search the collections of the Freedom Archives. Below is a brief guide that will help you conduct effective searches. Note, anytime you search for anything in the Freedom Archives, the first results that appear will be our digitized items. Information for items that have yet to be scanned or yet to be digitized can still be viewed, but only by clicking on the show link that will display the hidden (non-digitized) items. If you are interested in accessing these non-digitized materials, please email info@freedomarchives.org.
Exploring the Collections without the Search Bar
Under the heading Browse By Collection, you’ll notice most of the Freedom Archives’ major collections. These collections have an image as well as a short description of what you’ll find in that collection. Click on that image to instantly explore that specific collection.
Basic Searching
You can always type what you’re looking for into the search bar. Certain searches may generate hundreds of results, so sometimes it will help to use quotation marks to help narrow down your results. For instance, searching for the phrase Black Liberation will generate all of our holdings that contain the words Black and Liberation, while searching for “Black Liberation” (in quotation marks) will only generate our records that have those two words next to each other.
Advanced Searching
The Freedom Archives search site also understands Boolean search logic. Click on this link for a brief tutorial on how to use Boolean search logic. Our search function also understands “fuzzy searches.” Fuzzy searches utilize the (*) and will find matches even when users misspell words or enter in only partial words for the search. For example, searching for liber* will produce results for liberation/liberate/liberates/etc.
Keyword Searches
You’ll notice that under the heading KEYWORDS, there are a number of words, phrases or names that describe content. Sometimes these are also called “tags.” Clicking on these words is essentially the same as conducting a basic search.

COINTELPRO 101 Raw Materials

This collection features raw materials from the 2010 Freedom Archives production COINTELPRO 101.

Documents

Incident at Oglala Clips Incident at Oglala Clips
Date: 4/22/2009Call Number: C 10 040Format: DV CamCollection: COINTELPRO 101 Raw Materials
Documentary directed by Michael Apted on Native American activist Leonard Peltier. Following 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, and amid tensions between US government and Lakota Sioux, two FBI agents and one Native American killed by gunfire on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975. Peltier was later arrested and imprisoned, although there was little direct evidence, and others charged earlier were found not guilty on the basis of legitimate self-defense. Narrated by Robert Redford (also the executive producer), the film revisits the scene of the shooting and assembles archival footage and interviews to show how Peltier was never granted a fair trial, while painting a larger portrait of social injustice in view of the contemporary living conditions of Native Americans.
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz COINTELPRO 101 Extra Footage Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz COINTELPRO 101 Extra Footage
Call Number: C 10 132Collection: COINTELPRO 101 Raw Materials
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, daughter of a landless farmer and half-Indian mother. Her paternal grandfather, a white settler, farmer, and veterinarian, had been a labor activist and Socialist in Oklahoma with the Industrial Workers of the World in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The stories of her grandfather inspired her to lifelong social justice activism. From 1967 to 1972, she was a full time activist living in various parts of the United States, traveling to Europe, Mexico, and Cuba. In 1974, she became active in the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the International Indian Treaty Council, beginning a lifelong commitment to international human rights.