While there is now much more funding available for Alaska Native language work, the process of obtaining such funding is often obscure. Calls for proposals seem to be aimed primarily at ivory tower academics. Grant Writing for Indigenous Languages, by Ofelia Zepeda and Susan Penfield, goes a long way toward demystifying the grant-writing process. This 90-page manual takes the reader from the basic stages of identifying needs all the way through to formatting for submission. Along the way the manual deals with important issues such as whether to involve an academic linguist in a project and strategies for long-term archiving of materials. Having evolved from a 2006 AILDI workshop, the manual also includes many exercises which will help prospective grant writers to polish their grant-writing skills. Though aimed primarily at the NSF/NEH Documenting Endangered Languages Program, the manual is more generally useful for preparing proposals to other funding agencies, such as the ANA Native Language Preservation and Maintenance program, as well as private foundations, including the Endangered Language Fund and the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme. A list of funding sources is included in the manual.
The manual concludes with Dr. Zepeda's poem "Words on Your Tongue", the last part of which I cite below.
- You come with pollen resting on your shoulders
And the smoke from cleansing blessings
still lingering in your clothes.
Your family blessed you before you traveled.
They had prayers for your safety.
They held out gifts for you
gifts of words, of stories.
You come to us from people with
words on their tongue.
--Ofelia Zepeda, 2007
The manual can be downloaded as a pdf document from either the Teaching Indigenous Languages site [pdf] or the Endangered Language Fund site [pdf].