Indigenous Knowledge ProgramGrant Categories

Responsive Grants

Indigenous cultural knowledge—the source of Native identities, community, and sovereignty—have been relentlessly, systematically undermined, appropriated and destroyed by governments, museums, universities, and many other institutions and structures in American society.

By investing in knowledge makers, the Luce Foundation helps to ensure that Native America has the human and cultural resources it needs to thrive. We aim to cultivate a strong, vital, interconnected network of individual knowledge makers who can serve as advocates for their communities and as messengers amplifying the critical importance of Indigenous knowledge.

Through our support, the infrastructure that supports knowledge keepers—at the tribal, national, and institutional levels—will be more robust and philanthropy and mainstream cultural and educational institutions will be more conscious of and responsive to the knowledge needs of Indigenous people.

What We’re Looking For

The Indigenous Knowledge Initiative seeks to support community-engaged knowledge keepers and knowledge makers in Indian Country, and to strengthen the infrastructure that these community leaders rely on for support.
The selection process for the fifth cohort of the Luce Indigenous Knowledge Fellowship is underway. The call for the sixth cohort will be announced in spring or early summer.

Examples of Recent Grants

We’ve supported the development of a Cherokee digital archive and language tool at Northeastern University, an effort by the Native American Rights Fund to implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, the expansion of news coverage by Indian Country Today, and a project on Indigenous data sovereignty at the University of Arizona’s Native Nations Institute.

Luce Indigenous Knowledge Fellowship

Launched in 2018, the Henry Luce Foundation’s Indigenous Knowledge Fellowship supports knowledge makers and knowledge keepers serving Indigenous communities in the United States through a competitive program administered by First Nations Development Institute (FNDI).

Luce and our partners at FNDI believe that knowledge and ideas have the power to transform communities—at the local, national, and global levels—but only if it’s placed in the hands of passionate thinkers who want to build it and share it. By investing in intellectual leaders who are committed to spreading their work within the collective, we can empower the people that our fellows aim to address and serve.

In keeping with Luce tradition, we maintain an expansive definition of intellectual leadership which includes spiritual leaders, media makers, scientists, health professionals, academics, curators, artists, writers, and policy makers, among others. Their work may take many forms, such as journalism, visual art, film and video, speeches or sermons, educational curricula, music, theater, formal scholarship or research, public health strategies, legal arguments, fiction, and policy analysis.

The selection process for the fifth cohort of the Luce Indigenous Knowledge Fellowship is underway. We’ll kick off the application period for the sixth cohort in spring or early summer 2025.