Our Beginnings

Our initiative arose from and builds on work originating with indigenous peoples themselves. We closely involve tribal representatives in our design and conduct: our results are theirs. Although DAILP is hosted at Northeastern University, all aspects of the pilot of our site and subsequent use of our infrastructure takes their motivation and momentum from the work already being done by and in close collaboration with members of Indigenous Nations and communities.

DAILP builds on a 2014 IMLS SPARKS Ignition planning grant by Dr. Ellen Cushman with Gordon Henry at Michigan State University, “Analyzing Ojibwe and Cherokee Manuscripts: Proof of Concept for a Digital Archive.” MSU faculty, tribal representatives, and Cherokee and Ojibwe community members created and tested designs for an interface to facilitate the translation of Cherokee and Ojibwe manuscripts housed in archives and libraries around the country.

In 2015 Cushman joined Northeastern University’s English Department and began working with the library’s Digital Scholarship Group (DSG) to explore the development of a full-scale archive of Cherokee manuscript documents aimed at language learning and language persistence. Linguistic information donated by the Cherokee Nation and linguists Hiroto Uchihara and Brad Montgomery-Anderson has contributed to the lexical data set that informs DAILP’s translation process. In 2017-19, Cushman continued to develop collaborative partnerships with key archives and began the process of securing agreements to use materials at Yale’s Beinecke Library. The documents presented in the reading interface of DAILP have been freely translated into English by Ernestine Berry and a team from the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians: Clara Proctor, Oleta Pritchett, Marlene Ballard. In 2021, under a Henry K. Luce Foundation grant, the team gathered initial feedback on the reader interface of DAILP and identified desired features of a collective translation online interface. This interface would facilitate both translation and growth of the current linguistic architecture, expanding the collection.

Where We Are Now

Our collection contains five different genres of Cherokee writing, including funeral notices, church notes, letters, stories, and government documents. Each document can be viewed in a multi-layered format that presents layers in increasing detail. From the story, pronunciation, and word parts to detailed linguistic analyses of each word, these documents to help readers better understand how words and phrases are created in the Cherokee language. We are working with tribal community partners, scholars, and archivists to make sure that our reading environment allows users to most effectively discover documents, read source documents and translations, search for words, and explore linguistic information.

Where We’re Headed

Using the digital environment we’ve created so far, we will continue to work with both Cherokee community members and our advisory board to improve our understanding of how this online learning space can enhance existing language-related practices. We will also identify additional features that would improve translation, as well as language teaching and learning practices. To ensure that DAILP can be useful to a wide variety of audiences, our planning processes are conducted in collaboration with a variety of Cherokee language translators, readers, writers, and learners.

With support from the Henry K. Luce foundation, we are creating audio recordings of each source text to further enhance the site’s documentation and presentation of the Cherokee language. We have also began integrating curricular materials onto our website, including exercises for writing practice alongside key cultural knowledge for understanding Cherokee people and culture. These curricular materials use our historical documents to help learners find, read, write, and understand Cherokee in new ways and will soon be expanded with listening exercises.

With support from the National Archives, we are also creating a digital edited collection titled Cherokees Writing the Keetoowah Way. CWKW is rooted in the DAILP manuscript archive and its language data, but presents an expanded collection of documents through a reading framework that foregrounds genre, cultural thematics, scholarly and community contextualization, and commentary.

Our next major goal is to deepen our digital environment with a collaborative translation space where native speakers of the Cherokee language, learners and teachers, and scholars in the field can contribute their knowledge. This will allow users to both annotate documents at the character, word, phrase, and document levels and to discuss these annotations with others as a way of building knowledge and continually developing documentation of the Cherokee language.