Cherokees Writing the Keetoowah Way is made possible with generous support received from the Henry Luce Foundation’s Indigenous Knowledge initiative, the Northeastern University Tier One and Peak Award grants that have provided for the significant contributions of our team leaders: Shelby Snead, Naomi Trevino, Jeffrey Bourns, Julia Flanders, and our team members Hazelyn Aroian, Chan Mi Oh, Nop Lertsumitkul, Victor Mendevil, Kush Patel, Shashwat Patel, Melissa Torres, and Henry Volchonok. Ben Frey and Rachel Jackson’s expert summaries of content and feedback on the site has advanced the framing of the content and ensured the organization of our chapters– we thank them for their editorial expertise and generous feedback. Cherokee language instructors Patrick Del Percio, Mary Rae, and Mike White delivered instructional modules that creatively draw upon the translations and audio in these pages to advance the project of learning and teaching the Cherokee language.

We are deeply indebted to United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians translation team members Clara Proctor, Oletta Pritchett,  John Chewey, Tyler Hodges, and Ernestine Berry. As we developed this collection, we spoke with and received invaluable feedback and advice from our Editorial Board members and our Community teachers and translators.

We are grateful to the Kilpatrick Collection of Cherokee Manuscripts in the Yale Collection of Western Americana at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, whose digital collections have made the present work possible, and to the Newberry Library, whose collection of Cherokee documents has informed this collection.

We thank Darrell Meadows and George Miles for their belief in this project and support of its initial iterations– their encouragement motivated our team to pursue an expansion of our original corpus of twenty-five translated manuscripts into the present collection.