The materials consist of 30 volumes (about 8,500 pages) of linguistic and anthropological notes made about the Kwakwaka'wakw by George Hunt in Fort Rupert, British Columbia, between 1898 and 1931, at the request of and in collaboration with Franz Boas.

The texts, which consist of a wide array of stories and cultural information, were written by Hunt in Kwakʼwala with interlinear English translations. Hunt would mail small batches to Boas, who then made extensive corrections and notations on the pages. The manuscripts were given to Columbia University by Boas in the early part of the 20th century. (The actual Hunt/Boas correspondence is held by the American Philosophical Society.)

Hunt's information came from careful and extensive interviews with many Kwakwaka'wakw people, as well as from his Kwakwaka'wakw wives, but the manuscripts are not direct transcriptions of interviews. Rather, they are distillations of what he learned from his informants, and they also draw on his own experience growing up in Fort Rupert. Hunt himself was the child of an English father and a high-ranking Tlingit mother.

These manuscripts form the basis for most if not all of Boas's publications on the Kwakwaka'wakw, but are unique and distinct from the published materials in many ways. The manuscripts include Hunt and Boas's disagreements on Kwakʼwala orthography and English translations; Boas's annotations, with e.g. museum accession numbers next to references to ceremonial objects; occasional small drawings, some of which were not published; and multiple numeration systems that refer to various publications. These manuscripts are well-known in the scholarly arena and have been the basis for many publications over the last 100 years, but have been inaccessible to the Kwakwaka'wakw themselves.