Description

Ensuring the survival of Indigenous languages is a critical priority for Native people. Language is more than a symbol of cultural and political identity; it is not simply an historical legacy to be preserved out of sentiment. Rather, as many Indigenous language activists have explained to me, they seek to preserve language because it is the matrix within which their peoplehood is embedded. Culture, belief, relationship to the land and to ancestors live within language. Without language, these components of peoplehood wither; they become folklore, artifacts explained through translation into a language whose reference points, structuring philosophy, grammar are foreign.  
 
For these reasons, many of our applicants for the Indigenous Knowledge Fellowships have been language teachers and activists. And nearly a third of the Fellows themselves work in the language area. In order to support their work, and in recognition of the importance of the field to Indigenous knowledge, the Initiative on Native American Intellectual Leadership has also invested and will continue to invest in language projects outside of the Fellowship that have the potential to advance the field.  
 
Northeastern University has developed one such project. With the support of a special grant from the Luce Foundation, Dr. Ellen Cushman, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a professor of English at Northeastern, built an on-line, collective reading environment that makes use of Cherokee-language manuscripts and documents that are not easily accessible to Cherokee people. Working closely with speakers in Oklahoma and North Carolina, Prof. Cushman has digitized, transliterated, translated, and annotated a selection of prison letters, diaries, government documents and more. All of the underlying code is open-source; it is Dr. Cushman’s hope that the framework can be adapted for use by other Indigenous communities. 
 
The Foundation’s modest initial investment enabled Prof. Cushman to present other funders with proof-of-concept. As a result, the project has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the National Archives. That funding will enable her to continue to expand the archive.  
 
She and her colleagues seek additional funding from the Luce Foundation to design and carry out an assessment of the tool’s effectiveness in supporting language speakers and learners and to develop a plan for future expansion to Ojibwemowin (the language of the Ojibwe). Another output of the next phase of work is a scholarly book Cherokee Lifeways: Hidden Literacies of Collective Action .