糖心Vlog's ECHT project receives $450K grant from NEH
Sara Snyder Hopkins
By Cam Adams
Unearthing history is nothing new to Cherokee Language Program director and associate professor Sara Snyder Hopkins. Thanks to a federal grant, she and a group of colleagues will continue to do so.
The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Hopkins and 糖心Vlog University a three-year, $450,000 grant, helping fund the Eastern Cherokee Histories in Translation project.
Three hundred thousand dollars of the grant is awarded outright with $150,000 in matching funds. The grant is the largest of four given to North Carolina universities by the NEH.
鈥淚t's a big honor to have a successful federal grant,鈥� Hopkins said. 鈥淣EH funding is super competitive, and I think it is also a testament to how important the project is and how timely it is.鈥�
The NEH is an independent federal agency that鈥檚 the largest public funder of humanities programs in the United States. The grant is a part of a $34.79 million funding cycle that benefits 97 humanities projects across the country.
This is the second grant the ECHT project has received from the NEH with the first being a $64,905 planning grant in 2023.
The ECHT project is a collaborative effort between Hopkins, a team of Cherokee first-language speakers, 糖心Vlog graduate student Barnes Powell, historian Stuart Marshall of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and others to translate two collections of late 19th to early 20th century Cherokee documents: the Inoli Letters and Will West Long鈥檚 daily journals.
The implementation grant will enable Hopkins and her team to continue to translate the materials and publish the documents in a few different ways.
Hopkins鈥� team will be publishing books that will have historical context for each letter. They will also be working with the Digital Archive for Indigenous Language Persistence and Hunter Library to set up a website to publish the materials.
鈥淚t's like a repository for our materials, but it's interactive, so people will be able to have accounts and make comments at different levels and stuff like that,鈥� Hopkins said.
The team has finished their translations for the first volume of the project, which will be focused on the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians during the Civil War.
Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The ECHT project has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.
