The Sam Noble Museum of Natural History received a $345,494 federal grant to add and improve online access to the Native American Languages Collection.
The grant is to be used over three years to create an online collection of 9,000 pieces with over 1,300 Indigenous languages included for public use.
Raina Heaton, assistant curator of Native American Languages Collection at the Sam Noble Museum and assistant professor of Native American studies at the University of Oklahoma, is a linguist analyst who has worked with various Indigenous peoples to document languages.
“For all of us who do this kind of work, it is so important to make sure that not only are there recordings that we make preserved for future generations, but also accessible to anyone who wants to use them,” Heaton said. “It needs to be accessible to the community.”
The collection has been built up for over 20 years. Most of the collection is currently available by appointment at the Sam Noble Museum.
Making the collection available online would open up the collection to a much wider range of people.
This collection is made possible by Native people who share their language, culture and stories with people like Heaton.
“It is part of this larger shift in archives and museums towards working in collaboration with Native people, to do a better job than they had been historically,” Heaton said.
In order to receive the grant, Heaton started with a planning grant with the National Endowment for Humanities. The Sam Noble Museum held workshops with those who had donated or partnered with the collection to discover what they would want to see.
With that data, Heaton applied for and received a federal grant from the NEH. According to a press release from the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History, it is the largest NEH grant received by an individual at OU and the second largest NEH collaborative grant received at OU.
The collection contains documents, materials and recordings from various Native cultures across the globe. The collection includes something from each Oklahoma tribe to Yapese materials — a language spoken on the pacific island of Yap — and more. It also includes the largest collection of Dhegiha materials.
The online database does not yet have a public release date, but Heaton hopes it will be out in the near future.
Heaton is very grateful for all the support the Native American Language Collection has gotten.
“Thank you to all of our partners and the people who worked with us on this,” Heaton said. “It’s not a solo show.”
