Newberry Library Receives $4M for Language Revitalization

- The $4 million grant comes from the Mellon Foundation and will fund a five-year project. This initiative builds on a previous planning grant from the same foundation that ran from 2020 to 2023. - A primary goal is to digitize the Newberry's Ayer North and Middle America Linguistics Collection, which includes 2,439 items in more than 300 Indigenous languages. These materials will be made accessible on the library's website. - More than half of the grant's funds will directly support tribal nations through honoraria, travel, training, digitization, fellowships, and collaborative projects. - The funding will also create three new staff positions at the library to expand outreach and integrate Indigenous cultural protocols into the library's cataloging, digitization, and access policies. - The project is managed through the library's D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, which was founded in 1972 to encourage the use of the Newberry's extensive collections in the field. - The Newberry's Indigenous history collection is one of the largest in the world, containing over 130,000 volumes, one million manuscript pages, and thousands of maps, photographs, and drawings. - This grant is part of a broader trend of major philanthropic organizations, such as the Mellon Foundation, Ford Foundation, and W.K. Kellogg Foundation, funding Indigenous language revitalization projects. - The initiative will allow tribal nations to determine who can access culturally sensitive knowledge, a key aspect of building respectful and reciprocal partnerships, according to Rose Miron, the Newberry's Vice President for Research and Education.