July 29, 2010 – On July 20, it was announced that the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives received a $323,000 ‘Save America’s Treasures’ grant from the President’s Committee on the Arts & Humanities. The grant is to help ensure long-term preservation and better access to the Archives’ endangered-languages manuscripts.
The National Anthropological Archives is the nation’s main repository of original documentation for spoken, endangered and extinct Native American languages. Approximately 250 American Indian languages are represented in the collection. For many of these languages documentation does not exist anywhere else.
In 1879, an Act of Congress created an official repository for documents concerning American Indians that were collected by the Great Western Surveys of the United States. Today, the collection includes vocabularies, grammars, lexicons, synonymies, questionnaires, elicitations, texts, and narratives ranging from a Poosepatuck Indian vocabulary collected by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson in 1791 to 19th-century illustrations of Plains Indian sign language.
More than 600 on-site academic researchers use the collection each year. It is also useful to Native Americans and growing tribal language revitalization programs. In a press release, Robert Leopold, Director of the Archives, stated, “the collection is threatened by the deterioration of paper and by damage from repeated handling.” The preservation of at-risk items and digitization for online access aims to broaden access to endangered language materials. More than 8,200 pages of Cherokee-language materials have already been made available via SIRIS, the Smithsonian’s online catalog.
Additional information is available at the Smithsonian’s online newsdesk and on the website of the National Anthropological Archives.
