The Alaska Native Language Archive houses documentation of the various Native languages of Alaska and helps to preserve and cultivate this unique heritage for future generations. As the premier repository worldwide for information relating to the Native languages of Alaska, the Archive serves researchers, teachers and students, as well as members of the broader community. The collection includes both published and unpublished materials in or on all of the Alaska Native languages and related languages. The collection has enduring cultural, historic, and intellectual value, particularly for Alaska Native language speakers and their descendants.

In August 2010 the Archive was awarded a significant grant from the National Science Foundation to support development of digital access to over  10,000 documents in the collection. This project, entitled Digital Infrastructure for Alaskan and Neighboring Languages, (NSF #1003481), will create a digital repository providing access to the unique and world-renown collection of Native American language documentation housed at the Alaska Native Language Archive (ANLA) at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The comprehensive scope of the ANLA collection is unparalleled among linguistic archives across the world. Approximately three quarters of the material consists of original archival manuscripts, including field notes of prominent scholars of   Alaskan languages, including Knut Bergsland, Michael Krauss, James Kari, Jeff Leer, Irene Reed, and Eliza Jones. The collection also includes copies of items found elsewhere only in private hands or in obscure archives in Russia. Much of the collection has never been cataloged. The creation of a digital repository will enhance arctic research infrastructure by providing real-time digital access to archival documents for a broad range of researchers and Native peoples across Alaska, the arctic, and beyond, thereby providing the foundation for a new era of language and culture scholarship in the arctic.

The current issue (Volume 5, New Series) of the Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska (APUA) is titled The Dene-Yeniseian Connection. The editors are James Kari and Ben Potter. This 369-page volume contains 18 the papers from the Feb. 26-29, 2008 Symposium in Alaska plus several contributed papers. The 67-page lead article by Edward J. Vajda (Western Washington University) presents extensive evidence for Dene-Yeniseian. Accompanying Vajda’s paper are primary data on Na-Dene historical phonology by Jeff Leer, along with critiques by several linguistic specialists and articles on a range of topics (archaeology, prehistory, ethnogeography, genetics, kinship, folklore) by experts in these fields. For the Table of Contents and ordering information go to www.uaf.edu/anthro/apua. For news items see anlc.uaf.edu/dy.html