Written by Victor Hugo Mendevil

DAILP is honored to announce that we’ve received a generous grant from the Henry R. Luce Foundation in order to support our ongoing project’s infrastructure. Established in 1936 by Henry R. Luce, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Time Inc, the Henry R. Luce Foundation seeks to enrich public discourse by promoting innovative scholarship, cultivating new leaders, and fostering international understanding of Indigenous communities. We are immensely grateful to be selected as a project that matches the Henry R. Luce Foundation’s vision of excellence, equitability, compassion, and community.  

This grant expands the current work of translation and language learning on the DAILP site to focus on increasing the potential for language learners to become teachers, mentors, and translators of Cherokee in the future by using our interface. We will also share a vision for how our technological platforms can extend beyond the work itself, such as making linguistic history of the language available to learners, teachers, and translators. Finally, we hope to develop the initial aspects of the technology to focus on platforms that embed linguistic information in a context of language learning, translation, and community commentary. In short, we will use the support from the Henry R. Luce Foundation to build the conversation around Cherokee language learning, plan and administer the DAILP interface, develop translation processes, coordinate with pedagogy and mentorship programs, and gather more documents and increase the number of partnerships with institutional collections to expand our digital archive.  

With the ongoing support from the Henry R. Luce grant we have begun to recruit research associates and translators, as well as support instructional modules for our audio team. Thanks to the organization’s endorsement, we have been able to expand our personnel and help place DAILP team members in roles that expedite our mission and put their skills and capabilities to great use. We look forward to using the endowment to forefront our community-based work and knowledge. We greatly appreciate the continued contributions of all of our sponsors and look forward to building on the foundation of our work with every website update to effect meaningful change and dialogue.