By Office of Museum Services Staff

The Office of Museum Services recently published grant guidelines for the Native American/Native Hawaiian Museum Services program. This is part of a series of blogs highlighting the new grant guidelines and offering tips for applicants.

Did you know IMLS offers a museum grant program specifically for Native American tribes, Alaska native villages and corporations, and organizations that primarily serve and represent Native Hawaiians? Well, we do! Over the past 12 years, IMLS has awarded almost $11.5 million in grants funding more than 280 individual projects.

The Native American/Native Hawaiian Museum Services (NANH) program supports a wide variety of museum-related activities with the goal of sustaining heritage, culture, and knowledge, including exhibitions, public programs, collections management, and planning activities, to name a few. Examples of recently funded projects include:

  • The White Mountain Apache Tribe's Nohwike' Bágowa Museum in Whiteriver, AZ, will create “Nest’án (That Which Has Ripened),” an exhibition of traditional Western Apache diets. The exhibition will demonstrate traditional Apache foodways; the complex relationships among Apache people, their lands and all beings that share those lands; social organization; and ways of knowing that are all interconnected with traditional foods.

  • In Wailuku, HI, the Kaho’olawe Island Reserve Commission of the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources will develop a virtual museum to enable access to artifacts and documents related to Kaho’olawe, an island that is preserved and protected for Native Hawaiian cultural and spiritual purposes and generally inaccessible to the public. This virtual museum will make available currently inaccessible archival materials and an opportunity to preserve and share cultural heritage.

  • The Makah Indian Tribe of the Makah Indian Reservation located in Neah Bay, WA, will digitize and index fragile audio reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes, and handwritten transcriptions to preserve oral histories and facilitate access to archival collections. By creating accessible transcripts from translations of Makah language recordings of elders and fluent speakers, the project will allow tribal members to learn more about their history, cultural values, and traditional resources.

You can do the following to learn more about the program:

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Native American/Native Hawaiian Museum Services