Chicago’s Newberry Library gets $4 million to help tribal nations revitalize Indigenous languages

Chicago’s Newberry Library has received $4 million from the Mellon Foundation that will help widen access to Indigenous languages, some of which have been on the brink of disappearance.

The research library holds roughly 2,400 items directly related to more than 300 different Indigenous languages as part of its vast Indigenous Studies collections, which include more than one million manuscript pages, 11,000 photographs and 2,000 maps.

Right now, only a small percentage of that is available digitally, which can pose a barrier to tribal nations and scholars. Part of the new grant funding will focus on making more of the collection available on Newberry’s website, with a specific focus on language-related items.

“Those are often of major interest to tribal nations who are working on language revitalization activities,” said Rose Miron, Newberry’s vice president for research and education. “And so this grant includes the full digitization of that Indigenous languages collection.”

The loss of Indigenous languages has been called a state of emergency. Many languages were nearly eradicated after the U.S. federal government attempted to force Indigenous people to assimilate in the 19th and 20th centuries through orders that included Native American boarding schools.

“One of the biggest losses of those schools was the damage that was done to Indigenous languages because children were literally being punished for speaking their own languages and being forced to speak English instead,” said Miron, a historian whose area of study has focused on Indigenous history in the Great Lakes region.

Now, as many tribal nations focus on revitalizing languages and teaching them again, Miron said items in the Newberry’s collection can play a critical role, especially for nations with no living speakers.

“The documents that were created that have information about these languages are crucial for linguists who can then go in and help recover what these languages sounded like and start reteaching them,” Miron said.

The Newberry collection includes Bibles and other religious texts created by missionaries who were attempting to assimilate tribal members by translating those works to Indigenous languages. Among the other linguistic items are boarding school materials that were translated into Dakota.

“All of these materials provide an important connection to the past and an important connection to ancestors,” Miron said. “I have seen people in the collection weep upon seeing something that is related to their family, or is related to their community that they've never seen before.”

Tribal nations can also request digitization of other parts of the collection.

The Mellon funds will also be used to hire three additional staff members, including a second dedicated librarian for the Indigenous collection. Additionally, the dollars will go toward fellowships for people who work for tribal nations, travel for tribal members to visit the collection and for librarians to visit tribal nations. Some grant funds are intended, too, for compensation for tribal members who help the library review items in the collection and for in-depth projects with partner tribal nations.

In total, Newberry says, more than half the funds will go directly to tribal nations.

“We fundamentally believe that tribal nations are the best representatives of their own history,” said Miron, adding that the library is also open to repatriating items in its collection.

The Indigenous collection at the library originated with a donation in 1911 from the wealthy businessman Edward E. Ayer, whom Miron said was an avid collector of books, manuscripts, artwork and publications about different tribal nations. Ayer also endowed the collection, and that has allowed the Newberry to grow the collection over the years and dedicate a librarian to it.

In recent years, Miron said, the approach to expanding this collection has shifted to “prioritizing materials created by Native people rather than just materials about Native people.”

The latest round of Mellon funding is an extension of a previous planning grant, which the museum received in 2020. The planning process resulted in the “Indigenous Chicago” project, which looks to provide information and resources on Chicago’s historic and modern-day Indigenous communities. It includes interactive online maps that reinterpret Chicago’s history from Native American perspectives.

The project comes amid other recent local efforts to better recognize Indigenous people and their culture. A new partnership between the American Indian Center of Chicago and the Forest Preserve of Kane County led to the introduction of a new bison herd, bringing the animals to the local tallgrass prairie for the first time in 200 years. The center will steward the herd.

In her role at the library, Miron said she is conscious of the way institutions like Newberry have contributed to pain inflicted upon Indigenous communities. “As an institution that has benefited from colonialism, I really see it as our job to try to undo some of that harm and to really return control to tribal nations,” Miron said.

The grant work is now underway and will continue through December 2030.

Courtney Kueppers is an arts and culture reporter at WBEZ.